667: Struggling as a Teacher in the Age of COVID-10

I am a public school teacher (high school) and I happen to teach in rural Georgia, in the USA. I am really struggling this academic year. Last year was tough enough, when face-to-face school got called off one Friday in March and we were all teaching virtually on the following Monday.

I was teaching English last year, but I had some advantages over other teachers when we were suddenly all virtual. I have several professional certifications, including a Master’s in Technology Education (I started my teaching career as a Shop teacher (Industrial Arts for 18+ years), and I am all-but-dissertation status on a Doctorate degree in Online Learning. So, I had a leg up on going all-virtual over many other teachers. And it was still challenging, given that I am a conscientious teacher who actually tries to do what the administration says I am supposed to do, while at the same time doing all I can do to meet the needs of my students (not always the same thing). I went from my normal 10-11 hour day (manageable) to a 14-16 hour day (if things went well, more hours if things didn’t).

This year, our small, rural school started school pretty much on time at the first of August (even though there was lots of controversy about COVID-19). So far, our concern and adherence to CDC guidelines has kept COVID mostly at bay. Our small school is a federal Title 1 school, meaning that our poverty rate is high enough that every child in the county qualifies for free breakfast and lunch at school. Partly because of this status, we have also been awarded several grants that have enabled our little school system to provide one-to-one access to laptop computers for our students, something many of the surrounding county public schools do not have. All of our students do not have Internet access at home, but nearly all do.

Our teaching model this year has been a hybrid so far: parents and students had the choice to come to school for face-to-face instruction, or to work in a totally online platform – and about 30% of our student body opted to study at home, many stopping by school daily to pick up food packages from the federal school lunch program which they all qualify for. The rest have had traditional F2F instruction, with a heavy reliance on digital content using their school-provided laptop computers.

Slowly, we have been teaching our students how to use their devices in various ways to facilitate learning online, in case the federal or state government overrules our county’s Board of Education and closes the schools. They have learned to live conference, so we can teach live content. We should be able to continue live instruction remotely, with the teachers holding class at school and the students logged in, learning at home. A regular school day, all online. Our little school system will be, as far as we know, the first one in our state to do this.

Is it challenging? Sure, it is. Our infrastructure in our small, rural county in Georgia isn’t on a par with what people are accustomed to in urban Atlanta, or in the other, larger cities in our state. We don’t have 5G. When it rains, we blink out. Still, we can do this. Do we struggle? Sure, we do.

Still, it is a new world. Do I run the numbers to see if I CAN retire, instead of finishing out the last years I was planning to teach? At least once a month. I’m eligible to retire – I’m just not ready to, even as difficult, challenging, and annoying as this current school year is working out to be. I can still make a difference, and help some student along. That’s all I was ever in it for.

666: God and Loose Change

Image from: https://www.boundless.org/blog/challenge-4-loose-change-creates-change/

Like a lot of people, hubs and I have a jar for our loose change. We deposit our coins gained from our transactions on a daily basis, and when the jar gets mostly full, I pour it out on the kitchen table, count and roll the coins. The proceeds go into our savings account. Usually.

One way to pretty much guarantee that you are hearing a word from God is a thought that is Scriptural, which is something that you’d really rather not do. *sigh*

We have had for some time a change drive at church for the children’s and youth ministries, and I have given each week what coins I had in the change purse when I got to church on Sunday – usually a dollar or two. The coins I rolled at home today added up to over thirty dollars. When that thought popped into my head that I needed to give the entire stack of neatly rolled coin sausages, bulging with neatly stacked coins, I winced.

And then I CHOSE to take them to church and put them in the colorful plastic pail reserved for this offering. I was somewhat chagrined to realize I was being covetous about my COINS. Jeepers, creepers.

God gives us opportunities every single day to CHOOSE to become more like Jesus. Even when we don’t want to. Like that nifty little commandment to pray for your enemies and those who spitefully use you and say and do ugly, hurtful things about you and to you. I pray for them, far too often grudgingly, asking God to help me do it and be obedient, because He’s told me to pray for them. Sometimes prayer changes them, but it ALWAYS changes me. And I will stand in the hall of judgement one day and give an account of ME, MYSELF to God Almighty. I will not be giving an account of YOU, or of my enemies. So, God’s lessons are for ME and for MY benefit. Being obedient is one of those lessons that I CHOOSE. Praying for those people has gotten easier, because I have been obedient and done it before. Practice does make even difficult things a little easier to do.

Including CHOOSING to be more like Jesus when God gives me the nudge to do something I’d rather not do.

665: Man, There Just Ain’t No Way!

image from: https://www.wayfair.com/East-Urban-Home–Domestic-Chicken-White-Leghorn-Cockerel-CloseUp-Of-Head-And-Neck-France-Framed-Photographic-Print-FBBD8637-L1318-K~EAAC7526.html?refid=GX431844981303-EAAC7526&device=c&ptid=897477354446&network=g&targetid=pla-897477354446&channel=GooglePLA&ireid=39781661&fdid=1817&PiID%5B%5D=21913171&gclid=CjwKCAjw-5v7BRAmEiwAJ3DpuPJ8LtStOeZhDgk3s0orYIOhK9BCD0TO12Cieoa_MBu74m5PaJFJsxoCe50QAvD_BwE

When I was a youngster, one of my dad’s parishioners was a farmer raising egg-laying chickens. For those who do not know, this is when there is a huge chicken house (narrow but very long) where thousands of tiny chicks are delivered to be grown in a few months into egg laying-sized birds who produce eggs until their production slows with age and they are then collected and shipped off to the processing plant to become baking hens. What many do not know is that usually, these chicks are all female (DUH, eggs!). 20 thousand at a time.

The man was talking to my dad one time when I was close enough to overhear, and he was telling my dad this obviously amusing story about something that happened in one of his chicken houses. It seems that in this shipment of all-female chicks, there was a sex-ID error, and ONE ROOSTER got included in the shipment. The farmer was telling dad that every day when he went into this house to collect eggs and check that the feed and water lines were working properly, he would see this lone rooster perched up in the rafters of the building where he could look down on all the tens of thousands of industriously egg-laying hens busily going about their daily business beneath him.

The man told dad he was sympathetic with the rooster, who apparently was looking down at the sea of femininity below his feet, shaking his head and muttering to himself, “Man, there just ain’t no way!”

Since COVID-19 took over the world, I have come to thoroughly understand this rooster, as well. I look at the mountain of work I am expected to complete on a daily basis as a public high school teacher, shake my head and mutter to myself, “Man, there just ain’t no way!”

It is marvelously freeing and stress-reducing, just acknowledging that it cannot, and therefore will not, all get done. Permission to relax, ’cause it ain’t happening!

664: God’s Lessons from the Garden

With the time off I was given from COVID-19, I planted a garden. Because this was a last minute thing, my new tiny garden spot did not have amended and enriched soil (which takes some time and pre-planning). It was whatever was there when my cousin came over with his tractor and spent 15 minutes turning up the soil. Strike one.

I planted some seed that I had saved well over a year before from an acorn squash I bought from the grocery store. For those of you who know, often commercial produce is from hybrid, or cross-bred vegetable strains so that the resultant fruit is bigger and better than either parent variety – and that usually does not repeat with the offspring’s seeds. Even if it had been top-quality seed, that seed should have been planted the next growing season, instead of two or more seasons afterwards. Strike two.

When the plants grew to fruit-producing size, the scrawny vine sturdily put on three very small acorn squash. The smallest of these wasn’t even as large as my clenched fist – and I am not a large person. In due time, I harvested these three green balls of home-grown goodness.

Today, I prepared the smallest of the gardening results from this one courageous vine. I was surprised to see when the tiny squash was opened that it was stuffed full of seeds. Just for fun, I started counting the seeds this smaller-than-fist-sized squash created. I stopped when the number of seeds exceeded (no pun intended) 300. More than 300 seeds from a fist-sized squash planted in very poor soil from seed more than two years old.

God nudged me, as He often does about the garden. Jesus gave so many parables that were agriculture-related because the people of his time were agrarian, and could easily understand the analogies He made between the Kingdom of Heaven and growing plants and animals. Consider how faithful and how hopeful this tiny, stunted little squash was, growing under adverse conditions – and still creating seeds. If the seeds from this one tiny squash were all planted next year, its progeny would be the only thing the entire garden had room for.

God tells us to share His message – to plant seeds. God is responsible for the harvest. It’s our job to faithfully plant the seeds, counting on God’s faithfulness to increase our meager influence to yield the bountiful harvest – even when we are stunted ourselves from our circumstances. We can still be faithful and plant seeds. Even when we are small and insignificant – we can still be faithful and plant seeds. Work for the harvest yet to come. Plant the seeds.