mimsy and outgrabe

Inside The Grind When I first learned we were moving our classes fully online, I thought, "no big deal -- so much of my material is already up on Blackboard," but this was a false sense of security and possibly excessive pride, because this has turned out to be very untrue. I mean, yes, my materials are up on Blackboard, but they are not necessarily useful in terms of *teaching* -- discussion boards have to be created, and slide presentations need supplementary voiceover in the form of screencast videos, which are not necessarily difficult to create but *do* require me to have a quiet room to myself for at least 30 minutes per video -- usually more, because sometimes you mess up, even when you create a script. And the creation of the script itself takes time, as in at least another half hour, and creating these scripts when I'm interrupted by other members of my household every 15 minutes makes all of this course prep *while the class is already running* much like nav...

I'm not sure what I should write about anymore. That goes for the blog as much as for my poetry. I've been waking up each morning very early and allowing a small half hour for writing, but little has come of it. A draft revision here. Indulgent, self-pitying ramblings there. Sometimes I just stare at the page, or at the clock.  Vacillating between my children's distance education and teaching my own classes online has been challenging, sure, but I knew it would be. Yesterday was the first day I felt like we had a good rhythm going, like we were on the right track -- I had some optimism. My kids were engaged and doing what they needed to; I borrowed a Chromebook from our school district on Wednesday so that my youngest could do some of her online math and science activities next to me, while I responded to student emails and graded.  I was not fully prepared for answering quite so many emails. I don't know why -- it makes sense -- and yet it means that I haven...