It’s Gone Viral

Some journeys begin with just beginning. This week I will host my first ever remote math lesson with middle school students. I have no idea what I am doing and I am excited. Thank you, Covid-19. One hundred eighth graders have wormed their way into my heart and I can’t wait to see them.

As I imagine teaching these coming weeks or months, even though I feel I know nothing, it is possible that maybe a few things that mattered in my classroom last month will still matter under these new bizarre circumstances. I will teach in ways unimaginable just a few weeks ago, taking with me a few lessons from school.

Make math class joyful. Eighth graders love memes. And humor is even more essential when times are hard. The lesson I have planned has to do the memes that go viral. I chose one of my favorites to embed in the assignment and I will ask them to share too.

Making math relevant doesn’t mean analyzing pandemic data directly. When I taught social studies, current events would at times dominate public attention. 911, impeachment trials, and racial profiling begged for center stage in my lessons. And these events could also be too emotionally charged to stay focused on learning about the world. I found that I could often generate more learning by offering units that ran conceptually parallel to current events. For example, after 911, I taught about Pearl Harbor; the Clinton Impeachment meant lessons about Watergate; and racial profiling of Muslim people led to a unit on Japanese-American Internment. Once concepts had a life outside of current concerns, students could bring those ideas to bear as they examined the present.

I hope that teaching exponential growth this week will offer my students similar tools for understanding. For my first ever on-line lesson, students will solve It’s Gone Viral. The task is one I have used before under the title Rumors. In that version a rumor spreads. With this update, a meme goes viral.

A personal touch matters, even when remote and personal feel like contradictions. I have sent out dozens of personal invitations, each one tailored to what I know and wonder about each student. I asked Angel about her puppy. I enquired about Jordan’s website. I asked Elliot about his baby sister. After the ask, I invite and let them know their voice matters in our Zoom meeting. This is taking hours, but every moment is a joy — I call my students to mind, and reach out.

Not only do I ask, but I share. In my letter to families, I included the following:

My daughter, who works at a vet has had almost no change in her daily life — vets are essential services so she is fully employed. My son, who is a repair technician for gym equipment, is two weeks without work and trying to relocate for a job in another state to stay afloat. Only our dog, Echo, and our cat Duster are enjoying having me stay home all day every day. The animals love quarantine.

In sharing, I invite our lives to feel a bit closer even as we keep our distance.

One-size-fits-all for learning still does not exist. This was true before before our schools closed, but now it will be even less true. Everyone will struggle with an unusual amount of uncertainty about what the coming weeks will bring, but I can only imagine what life is like for each of my families during this pandemic. The same stay-at-home order impacts each student differently.  Some families are ready to jump in with adult-guided homeschooling.  Others are buried under burdens that have only increased with each passing day.  Some young people may be caring for younger siblings, while others are home alone all day.  Offerings will need to be varied and flexible with multiple points of entry.

None of us have every done anything like this before. As with any new learning worth learning, the path forward will be messy. If I am successful with this first lesson, Zoom will max out, I will have no idea how to facilitate so many voices on such a tiny laptop screen, connections will be dropped, audio feedback will drown out voices, and we will have done something none of us have ever done before and at the end we can celebrate the wild success that it happened at all.

Remember to teach how to be together along with teaching the math. It will feel awkward to be little faces on the screen when we are used to being whole bodies occupying common space in a classroom. We learned to communicate in room 121. Now we get to learn to communicate in the two-dimensional realm of Zoom. There are chat, screen-sharing, whiteboards and break-out rooms to learn, use and explore in ways that let us all attend to each others’ thinking and presence.

Thoughtful planning always matters. Between now and my first ever online math lesson, I will think through every aspect of the hour my students and I will spend together. If joy and learning are to happen, I need to know and anticipate each of the little pieces that matter. I will update this post tomorrow with my detailed first ever Zoom lesson plan. Carry on colleagues. You got this.

Please post your comments. What are you doing that you have never done before? What matters from your classroom that still matters this week?