Today is April 10th, 2020. This is New York City’s third complete week of distance learning. I’ve learned a lot of lessons during these first 3 weeks but I decided to keep it to the 5 most important lessons I learned so far from distance learning!
The Beginning of Distance Learning
This was the first time in our history, especially in New York City that schools have been shut down. To say that I’m feeling a whirlwind of emotions would be an understatement. At first, I felt serious relief when I heard the Mayor of NYC announce that schools would be closed until after spring break. As that first week went on, teacher’s were told to report for three days to plan for distance learning. I won’t get into the lack of equity in that last statement, as I teach in the Bronx borough. My feelings started to change from relief to worry, stress and a whole lot of anxiety.
After all, I’m a teacher. I live to be in the classroom. With 30 pairs of eyes starring intently at me- waiting for what I’m going to teach or do next. Distance learning has changed what it means to be a teacher.
Here are the lessons I’ve learned in the last three weeks as we began to shift our instruction from the classroom to online.
Lesson 1 from distance learning :
Set routines (both for yourself and your students)
The entire first week of distance learning is very similar to the first month of school. It’s all about setting routines and procedures. Make sure to plan for this before you begin remote learning. Think: attendance, submission of work, how you’ll organize your lessons or teach them, what websites you’ll use and more. Your students, just like in the classroom, will strive and feel most successful if there’s consistency in your expectations of them and the routines you put into place. But, setting routines and procedures isn’t JUST for your students, it’s for you, too. It took me the entire first week to realize that I was not managing my time wisely and I felt down right exhausted, more stressed, less productive and extremely sluggish. That’s when I decided to come up with a manageable realistic schedule for myself and my students.
Lesson 2:
Make time for you each day
This may sound cliche. But remember how I said I felt exhausted, stressed and extremely unproductive during that first week of remote learning? Yeah. You want to try to avoid feeling like this. Within my realistic distance learning schedule, I’ve made time for myself each day. I’m going to repeat that one more time. I make time for myself each day. That’s not selfish, it’s necessary. I know some of you reading may have kids and may be thinking “time for me? what’s that?” And I’ll repeat this again, time for you is necessary.
Time for you may look different than my “me time.” My “me time” consists of me working out, eating food that makes me feel good, reading, learning, cooking, organizing, spending time with my husband and an occasional binge watching. Let me just preface with this, I don’t have kids currently so it is, in a lot of ways easier for me to find “me time.”
But, in the event that you do have children, you need to make yourself a priority because it’s impossible to pour from an empty cup. The easiest way for me, personally, to schedule in a healthy balance of work, personal things that need to get done and “me time” is by making a to-do list DAILY on a post-it. Yours might go in your planner, or you may prefer digital to-do lists. Every day you’ll see the same things on my to-do list; workout, push-ups, log my food, gratitude and read. Below is an example of my to-do list that is ever changing!
Lesson 3 of distance learning:
Find things to be grateful for
This is a practice that I started a while ago. In fact, I started and stopped this practice many times. In all honesty, I really started committing to practicing gratitude back in October. If you follow other blogs, listen to podcasts or invest time into any kind of personal development, I’m quite sure this is something you’ve heard before. I didn’t make up practicing gratitude. I am, however, a testament to this having a positive impact on my life. Every single day, I write down five things that I’m grateful for. I am a huge fan of Rachel Hollis, so I write it down in her Start Today journal. You can get that here. But you don’t have to get all fancy or spend any money to do this.
One way to practice gratitude is in any old notebook you have lying around (Lord knows I have a bunch of these and my husband is always giving me a hard time when I buy new ones but haven’t finished any of my other notebooks, but that my friends is a story for another day). You could use your planner, a digital document, or even a note on your phone. What’s truly amazing about practicing gratitude is that when you spend time finding things to be grateful for, you suddenly start to realize that you have a TON of blessings in your life, no matter where you are in your life or what you’re going through.
It’s important to note that you don’t necessarily want to name materialistic things. For example, yes I love my new Fabletics workout pants but this is something that’s materialistic. So instead, I may say that I’m grateful for the way my Fabletics workout pants make me feel or look. In the beginning, you may start with a lot of materialistic things or cliche things like “my family” or “my health” but you really want to devote time to finding small blessings in your life like “writing with a purple pen.” With practice, you will get better at this!
Anyway, the reason this is an important lesson during quarantine is simply because the media (both news and social media) are FLOOOOODED with negativity. Death tolls. Number of cases of COVID19. And so on. I want to be clear that I’m not saying you shouldn’t be informed, you most certainly should be but you should not be CONSUMED. With that being said, it’s now more than ever that we have to focus our energy on the things we have to be grateful for. Even in the worst of situations and scenarios, I’m positive that we can still find blessings. Practice gratitude and watch it change your life! Below is an example of practicing gratitude from my Start Today journal. I hope you continue this even after distance learning.
Lesson four:
Continue to prep!
Yes, I know this is going to sound like a crazy suggestion. Why prep meals or follow a normal cleaning routine when we are home, this is distance learning after all. Well, honestly the simple answer is that it provides us with some sense of normalcy. Or at least I’ve found that it provides me with some normalcy. Usually, during the school year, I meal prep on Saturday’s and clean on Saturday’s. Unless I have another commitment, then I may use Sunday’s. I’ve continued to prep during these past two weeks. Since doing this, I’ve felt a lot less stress and anxiety related to cleaning and/ or meal prepping. Sometimes with remote learning, your hours may vary. Which isn’t always good when it comes to making nutritional decisions. Prep, anyway!
Lesson five of distance learning:
Keep track of student information & participation
If you’re an avid reader, or know me personally, you know organization is so important to me. To learn about my classroom library organization, you can click here. Anyway, there are really two parts to lesson number five. The first is keeping track of student information ALL in ONE place. Having all of my students information in one area saves me time when they forget a password or username. The second part of this lesson is keeping track of student participation. I created another Google Sheet to track weekly participation and do this on Monday mornings for the previous week to give my students the chance over the weekend to complete missing work. Now, when report cards come rollin’ around (like they always do) I’ll be able to access my Google Sheet and make a good judgement without having to backtrack or second guess myself.
Mic drop.
No but really, while these may sound like very small lessons, these five lessons have helped me a ton and I hope they help you too- whether you’re more experienced with distance learning or less experienced- we can all learn from each other!
Xo,
