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Please Mr Andrew’s, let us remote teach…

Posted on July 11, 2020 by Dave GN

I know, it has been a long while since this blog was use. All my subscribers have left. Life got in the way, as it so often does.

I live in Melbourne. I teach at a wonderful Government school here in the Eastern Suburbs. I have been there 5 years a bit now and love my job. Not as much as I used to, because I can’t actually do my job at the moment, due to the global pandemic (you may have heard about it……..). The Job I am doing is making the best of a situation, but it is beginning to feel like I am being sacrificed and unnecessarily risked.

The news over the last few days have made me physically ill. Literally, I am so stressed and worried my stomach is playing up. The idea of returning to school, under these circumstances has made me too things; outraged and terrified.

The idea that the government is so willing to risk my health and those of my family, by making all schools go to remote learning, to achieve the purpose of making it “fair” for year 12s is absolute bullshit. Guess what Dan, the scores are not going to matter, as the Uni’s have already lost 50% of there enrolments due to no international students; there will be spaces if you bloody well fund them! You want to talk about fair, think of my kids who could lose a parent (as we are both teachers) or a sibling because we were forced back to work, when it was something we could do from home, like you keep saying – if you can work from home you must work from home.

Social distancing at schools is not physically possible – you built the schools that way, look at your own blueprints. Ask any damn teacher who was there last term, and it was a joke of a concept, we couldn’t truly enforce, which is why the government said, “social distancing does not apply to students while at school”.
1. Yes, kids appear to be resilient to the virus, but teachers are not – we are adults and like other adults – we should be avoiding contact with everybody for fucks sake, as per the advice previously mentioned.

Remote teaching worked last time. It was painful. It sucked. It sucked for teachers, it sucked for parents, and it sucked for teachers who were parents (probably even more). I hated every minute of it. It was not the job I signed on to do and not something I would ever do again, unless necessary. It was hard – I worked harder than I every have. My wife and I will testify to this in court if need be; we spent 8 hours a day remote teaching, managing a 7-year old’s remote learning, providing childcare for our 18-month-old, plus normal household duties. Then after the kids were in bed, on average, we would each spend another 3 or 4 hours doing the work we could not do with our own kids under foot – marking, providing feedback, prepping lessons etc.

We tried remote teaching from onsite for two weeks before the students came back. All it did was make me depressed and worried; raised my general anxiety levels to new heights; cause me immeasurable stress; and overall made me worse at remote teaching and less productive in general.

Look this is a rant, but I need to express my feeling and thoughts about this. I want the world to return to what it was; I want to teach again, in the classroom, not worrying about getting sick or making my family sick. BUT that is not possible at the moment, we are in a global pandemic. That is the reality of 2020 and life for the immediate future.

What do I want moving forward? I want to do my job, without be lied to or being asked to do something that endangers my family. I work as a teacher. Not a doctor, not a nurse, not a soldier and not a cop. I am not a babysitter, though often treated like one. I am an educator. I should be able to do my job without jeopardizing my health or safety or that of my family. I want to remote teach from offsite, so that I can do the best job I can, working with the least amount of stress and fear possible; I want to keep Mickey and Lachie safe. I do not think it fair that I will have to risk them in care, when we have other options, that worked last time.

Please let us teachers go back to remote learning, Mr Andrews. Let us do the jobs you pay us for without risking our health and that of our family’s.

My Internet Addiction

Posted on June 28, 2017June 27, 2017 by Dave GN

A few months ago now, I had a lot of problems with my home internet connections, which is thankfully was resolved after a week. My phone was also being repaired, so I didn’t have it either. To compound the problem, or make it even more interesting, we also had been having ongoing issues with my school’s connection, but this was not as annoying as my home problems. For me, these issues have really highlighted how integrated the internet, and more specifically access to it has become in my life.

I use it for so much of my communication, work and entertainment that when it is not working, even if I don’t in fact need it to do what I am doing, I feel that something is “off” in my personal world, when it is not working. I have been reflecting on this experience and these feelings as of late, in an attempt to understand why that is.

Lots of people have written on this subject, and I have read reasonably widely of them. There are lots of theories and different explanations of this phenomenon, which range widely and differ significantly. In my own head, I have amalgamated them into my own explanation; it my opinion and is what makes sense to me. I think it is due to the integrated nature of the internet into my life. It is something, like my phone or my watch, that I take for granted. I assume that it works and that I have it with me. I think about internet access in the same way.

Let me digress, and use an example involving my watch, to explain. I wear a watch every day. I have for years and years. I don’t wear it when I sleep for some odd reason. I always take it off when I get into bed for the night. It is just what I do. Somedays, rarely, I end up not putting it on and heading off to work. (Yes, I forget it. I am not a morning person and even with coffee I don’t operate on all cylinders first thing.) When I first realize that I forgot it, a cycle of looking at my blank wrist begins. It drives me nuts all day, especially when I am not on a computer with a clock starting at me constantly. When I don’t have it, I notice; when I do I am not even aware of it being there. And the internet has become the same.

I have known for a while, that my phone is not primarily a phone anymore; phone calls and text messages are my primary communication channels. Email, instant messenger programs and Skype are my primary means of communication at work and at home. Pretty much the only one who text messages me is my wife and occasionally other family members; my communication with friends is via the other mentioned services, which are internet dependent. When the network goes down, I feel a profound sense of disconnection to the world.

The internet in the last few years (if 10 counts as a few…) has become so integrated into my (and probably everyone else’s) lives that I must actively think about what is connected via the web and what is not. So many of my daily services are interactions need that global connection. At school our learning management system is not hosted on site; neither is our email; many of our regularly used services require internet access. I am a Dropbox user; every file I create for work or personally, lives in my Dropbox, which syncs them between my various computers. I don’t think I have used an USB to transfer files between my devices for about 2 years now. My system backups are also on a server somewhere, sitting in a data center located who knows where on earth. I read the news on websites instead of physical papers. Hell, I even stream the news nowadays as it means I can watch it when I am free to and want to, not when it is being broadcast.

In writing this, I have realized that I am in reliant on the internet, maybe even addicted to it. The brief week I had no internet at home and intermittent internet at work was stressful. I was unwillingly unplugged, and it really bugged me. It was beyond a mild annoyance or frustration, and almost seemed to be like a mild withdrawal. Admittedly, I have no idea what withdrawal is like. I don’t think the days when I miss my morning coffees count.

I think I can say I am addicted to the internet; not a site or activity, but the connectivity of the thing. It is a web (pun intended) that binds me to the world and connects the world to me. I am an internet addict and I am happy with that.