2021

“Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, we’re so glad you could attend come inside come inside”.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer

The Covid-19 pandemic was starting to remind me of the opening line from this ELP song off their amazing album Brain Salad Surgery (1973). I was incredibly fortunate that my parents had phenomenal taste in music.

The new school year would be anything but routine. We began preparations over the summer for what would be a hybrid/remote student population. I prepared a number of schools over the summer for the inevitable streaming classroom by pushing our ISP, Spectrum, to install fiber. Through much persistence I found out that Spectrum will cover the costs of the installation for up to $20k. Fortunately, no trenches had to be dug for the schools, so the costs came in under $20k and were therefore covered by Spectrum. I spent most of the summer managing the complexities of a fiber installation at two campuses. Everything from cajoling Spectrum management, coordinating site inspections, contacting neighbors to allow Spectrum access to their basements, you name it. I was determined to get the schools the bandwidth they would need to support an entire school streaming their classes.

I also picked up a new client who needed his home network upgraded. This experience was quite unique. He was running a real estate management business out of his home office which employed a Win 2000 server, Win XP laptops, and some other Smithsonian esque hardware. I backed up everything, configured, purchased and installed new hardware for his office and outfitted his home with new a new Unifi wireless network.

The school year was probably the most difficult I’ve ever experienced in my 15 years of teaching. We had about 50% of the students remote and virtual teaching is no substitute for in person learning. I was running virtual classes at the same time as having students in the classroom. The impact to our most dis-advantaged students was on full display. I worked many hours of overtime conducting private virtual sessions but deep down I felt a tremendous sense of sadness for my students who could not keep up. I tried my best to put on a happy face and provide extra opportunity. Unfortunately, in my opinion, all of our best efforts were just that.

We did try to continue with some traditions. I collaborated and edited a virtual event where students submitted video clips and presentations for our virtual Thanksgiving celebration we call Cultural Harmony Day.

I tried my best to keep things light. One of the clubs I moderate is the Anime/Gaming club. Virtual clubs were not easy to keep going but with the help of Among Us, we were able to have some fun.

One amazing positive to come out of the pandemic from a teaching and learning perspective was opening up the school to new opportunities through virtual teaching. Out of nowhere an alumnae, who was one of my first students to take my AP Computer Science A class, reached out to me to thank me because she said that my course led her to become a Game Design major at Northeastern University. Besides thanking me, she also said she wanted to give back. So she put together a curriculum for a Video Game Development club and we began running it in January.

It’s little things like that, that make all of the complexities and complications of being an educator just melt away.