Disclaimer: What follows is not a complaint. It is documentation. I know many have it worse: I recognize that I am beyond lucky to still be employed and receiving a paycheck. But this site is about “where practice meets policy.” What follows is where my practice is given current policy.
At 6:00am, my phone buzzes that the scheduled post on my first-period Google Classroom has gone live. When I check, I also see a few emails from students, time-stamped at 2, 3, or 4am. If it’s a good day, I’ve been up since 5:30, maybe had a cup of coffee, and I’m heading out the door for a run or into the garage for a workout when that notification comes in. The “good” days have not been particularly frequent.
Until March of this year, I never allowed work email notifications on my phone. I had to have a line drawn somewhere, and I have spent the last six years of my career building boundaries brick by brick: work and life needed separation. Those boundaries dissolved when I realized that I needed to be “on” and accessible to my students and my colleagues in some way similar to how we could step across the hall for a quick question or walk to the back of the room for a check-in. I turned on email notifications on my phone after logging in one mid-day and seeing a string of messages from students who had questions that had hung in the ether unanswered.
In my mind, I sensed momentum lost and opportunity missed.
By 8:00am, I’ve double checked to make sure the day’s recorded video lessons are ready to roll for any student who might need them. Typically by then, the first email or two has started to come in from my early-bird students, so I thumb out some replies on my phone.
Around 8:30am, I negotiate with my three sons about shower access, breakfast, and their own home-learning to-do list, check on my wife in the back room (now in week three of COVID symptoms…not bad enough for a test: doc says the course of action would be the same either way and there already are not enough tests to go around, but she’s not good enough to rejoin the genpop yet) and set up my workstation in my garage next to the radial arm saw, the only place in our tiny house without constant thru-traffic from my three sons or the dog.
According to the contract MOU between my association and my district, I am expected to be available to students and my employer between 9am and 3pm, with the assumption that other work outside those hours will be conducted at a time and place of my own discretion. I feel this is reasonable, especially since I actually get bathroom breaks whenever I want.
Between 9am and 10am, I have “office hours,” where I’m expected to be easily accessible to students electronically. This usually means a slight uptick in email activity, more notifications or questions or turn-ins on Google Classroom. All of the work I’ve assigned is asynchronous, so I devote this time to also scouring past assignments to check on progress, drop notes of feedback, or update “grades,” which I’ve decided are on the binary in Skyward (our grading program): a checkmark if you did it, an asterisk if it is missing.
From 10:00am until about 11:30am, I’m a mess of multitasking: Responding as quickly as possible to email or Google Classroom messages from kids, updating our contact tracking spreadsheet we use as a staff to monitor student engagement, designing upcoming projects or mini-lessons, and scouring the internet for ELA texts my students can access for free without breaking too many copyright laws. Some days, I’ll hold a “Google Meet” synchronous session with groups of kids or make phone calls to students I have not heard from recently. Also, if my neighbor isn’t chainsawing down a tree or testing the throttle on his Harley, I’ll record my read-alouds of articles and texts for my students who need their text aurally supplemented. If the weather’s bad and the neighbors are all inside, I’ll try to get ahead on my video lessons, which are typically narrated walkthroughs of slides and examples on my computer.
I tell myself that lunch is at 11:30, but usually by the time I look up from my work it is after noon, and I make a circuit through the house to check on the offspring: What have you checked off the whiteboard to-do list we keep on the fridge? Did you eat lunch yet? Who made that mess and why? Show me on SeeSaw that you actually turned that in…no doing it “in your head” isn’t enough, your teacher needs to see the work…
At 12:30 I’m back at my computer for office hours and a masterclass in multitasking inefficiency and the dangers of constant email notifications coupled with the pressure to feel like I need to “be there” when I’m “needed.” If it wasn’t a “good” morning and I didn’t get a run in, my Fitbit registers around 2,000 steps for the day so far.
Many days, the 12:30 to 1:30 window is wall-to-wall phone call check-ins with kids and families. Other days it is devoted to planning fourth quarter, which will be 100% “distance learning.” My seniors completed the first chunk of English 12 during second quarter from November to January; for fourth quarter, they start the final chunk on April 27th. It weighs heavily that I will not see some of them face to face ever again.
By 1:30, I have to move, so I do another lap through the house to figure out what school work my offspring haven’t done, check on my wife in the back room, and sometimes venture outside for a few minutes.
There is usually a lull in student emails or notifications in the afternoon, and on Wednesdays we have an all staff Zoom meeting check in (all nine of us) to talk through any kids we haven’t heard from, the latest changes in directive for the district or state, and share tips and tricks about what is or isn’t working to foster engagement-at-a-distance. The mid-afternoon for me is also when I print out paper copies of work or correspondence to physically mail to kids who need the materials or the reminders. Once I get a stack of packages or envelopes together, every few days or so unless it’s urgent, that gives me an excuse to get in the car and find a bluebox drop-off (I print the postage at home).
The emails and notifications from students start to pick up again around the time I need to start cooking dinner for the heretofore neglected offspring, so the afternoon is usually my time for check-ins with them on their school work. This is usually when we work in the 4th grade math lesson for my youngest (turns out I still hate fractions), before he and I engage in unilateral negotiations over whatever work he doesn’t want to do. Luckily the other two are generally independent and the discussion is more about why finishing school work early doesn’t mean that you deserve an extra three hours of xbox time.
As I cook, I thumb replies to student questions on my phone, occasionally pivoting to my laptop for replies that require more meat. After dinner is served, complained about, and then cleaned up, I crash in a chair with my laptop (in the house this time) to work on planning or (re)designing projects and lessons.
If I get enough checked off my list (my school to-do list is on the fridge whiteboard right next to my sons’ lists), I put on an audiobook and go for a walk. I try to ignore the notifications on my phone.
I usually get home a little after dusk, reply to those notifications I’ve managed to ignore, and double check that the announcements or mini-lessons I’ve scheduled to auto-post tomorrow are ready to go. One more loop through the house to check on everyone, break up sibling fights, or order the dishwasher emptied (there are five of us and we somehow go through sixty-eight-thousand glasses per day).
When my head eventually does hit the pillow, the list starts to roll: Students I didn’t hear from today. Students I haven’t heard from at all. Things I should have done to try to engage them. How nice it used to be to feel competent. What competent would even look like in this setting. Sometimes I even fall asleep.
I keep telling myself I have to get up from the computer at least once every hour. Well, at least once every two hours. Well, at least once before lunch….
Yes. Definitely. There is still so much that we do as teachers and it has become much more difficult to draw lines between personal lives and work lives. They are slowly becoming intermixed. We all need to work on developing a new work/home balance. Thank you for sharing this.
Mark, thank you for opening up and sharing this. My distance learning experience is definitely different, but the feelings are all the same. My work/life balance lines have blurred beyond recognition and it’s frustrating. The work was never-ending before, but now at times it feels almost impossible to escape. You never know if you’re doing enough, and even if you are, you will never feel that it is enough.
Thank you for writing this and helping others begin to understand that we are still working a lot. Honestly, a day in the life of a parent/teacher is a great mountain to climb day in and day out. When you wrote about thumbing through notifications and trying to reply to them while cooking dinner is incredibly common for all teachers right now. I find myself doing the same thing because I am trying to meet the needs of all my students. Congratulations on persevering with some form of self-care every day even though mentally the guilt of taking that time for oneself can be overwhelming.