Crash @crash@is.aaronbsmith.com

I wonder how many educators are on here.

There were thriving communities of educators on Tumblr and Twitter, but Tumblr's went to heck after moderated hashtags went away and Twitter is ... Twitter.

The fediverse has Scholar.social, but that's more of an instance for college/university level academics. I'd like to connect with other K-12 educators.

Good morning friends.

Dance production's final show is today.

It's also going to be 90F and middle school gyms, by county policy, do not have dedicated AC.

It's going to be a warm one.

High School Yearbook where each senior photo is done up like the most clickbatey of YouTube thumbnail videos.

Good morning, friends.

Today my Media Arts students begin work on their penultimate projects (of their own design and rubrics), and my 2nd graders are making video games.

Story concept that needs to exist if it doesn't already:

A bunch of people in a coffee shop that all tell fanciful tales starring slightly changed versions of the main cast.

A Coffee Shop AU Nexus.

Good morning, friends.

We have our "End of Year Staff Meeting" this afternoon.

It's the one where we go over all of the end-of-year closeout procedures.

I am glad that people can change.

I teach students from when they're 5 until when they're 13. There's a lot of needed changes over those important years.

I am glad they can keep changing after that, as well.

I wish more people knew they could keep changing, so they would try it for themselves.

Yes, I am keeping this as a running tally.

Yes, I am sharing this information with staff and students.

Historically I have had coworkers threaten me with physical violence for maintaining this countdown.

104 days until the first real day of next school year.

(This doesn't include Orientation Days or days where teachers report to school but not students.)

Remembering the time when there was some concern in our D&D group, so we got together, and the affected parties shared their concerns, and we agreed on a plan moving forward that prevented things from getting worse.

And it worked.

We still play D&D together.

It never got to the point where I'd call it "drama," because as chaotic as we can be, we know when to be adults.

I added a noise gate filter to OBS to try to reduce my room's air conditioner white noise and oh my gosh it worked flawlessly and instantly.

I'm not used to filters working so well without having to fine tune things for at least a few minutes.

Especially not if they're open source.

Feeling like it would be nice to take a personal day at some point before the end of the school year, but we have too many activities planned and too many teachers out already.

Like, every day we have classes covered by others and/or split up into multiple rooms.

I don't want to add to that problem.

So I power through, even with the tank running on empty.

Some of my 2nd graders have excelled at every coding lesson I've thrown their way. Others have been actively avoiding doing anything related to the instruction.

Most are somewhere in between those extremes, but with enough work that if I just said "Complete the lessons you haven't yet finished" for our remaining 4 weeks of active instruction, most of them would have something to do.

For the ones who finish, well ... we're in an Arts school. I'm sure there's something they can play with...

Good morning, friends.

I just did lesson planning for my last 2nd grade coding lesson of the year.

Not all of them are at the point where they'll be working on it this week, but those who are ready can get started.

On paper we have 5 weeks left in the school year, but that includes early dismissal days on the last partial week.

Maybe if we paid substitute teachers what they are worth I wouldn't have been asked to cover two different classes today.

But that would imply we're already paying teachers what they're worth.