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Day 5

Charles Hoover

I’m actually writing this on the next day because Sunday was kind of a lazy day. We spent most of it watching movies and playing Minecraft. That is a game that can suck the time right out of a day. We also went to Target to pick up some items that I had ordered the night before. I kind of like this way of shopping, but I have a feeling that after this crisis is over we’re all going to go back to the way we used to do it.

The weather hasn’t been cooperating much either. Even though it is Spring, we still had some snow showers yesterday and it was rainy pretty much the rest of the day. We did get a chance to go out for a walk later in the afternoon. Exercise has been a big issue. During a typical day at school I can easily get in 10,000 steps. But with the way the weather has been recently, it’s been tough to get even 7,000 steps.

Day 4

Charles Hoover

Today felt like a typical Saturday. We got up, had some breakfast then went to Lowes to get some yard supplies. The main difference was that I had ordered ahead and then we tried to minimize our contact with other people as we picked up our order. I felt as though any person that we came in contact with could have had the virus and that everyone we saw felt the same about us. Once we got home, we unloaded the truck and then spent the rest of the day in the house.

Joan and Garrett like to remind everyone that every time we leave the house, we need to start the 14 day timer for seeing if we have picked up the virus again. I’m not planning on going any where tomorrow, but someone will need to go to the store for milk and probably other supplies.

I spent a good chunk of the day getting my Plex Server organized and updated. The drawback is that I’m planning on moving it to another computer so that I can work on the workstation that it is currently on. That may require getting everything reorganized but I’m pretty confident that as long as I have my movies and episodes named right, everything should go back to the normal order again.

The other thing I was working out was being able to play some board games online, which I think I can do now through Zoom. I was trying to see what I could use so that most of the students could attempt it and that the experience would be acceptable. I think if I use my iPad, they should be fine. It may take a little longer than when everyone is present but it will work out if everyone is patient. I would also like to record it so that we can post it online for others to watch and enjoy.

Well time for regular Saturday night TV, Svengooly followed by a little Star Trek.

Day 3

Charles Hoover

Today felt like everything was starting to gel into the new normal for how the rest of these days would be going. I think that we will need to take a break from school work the next couple of days, and perhaps a couple days into our “Spring Break” time.

We pretty much followed our schedule that we’ve been following for the previous few days. No one left the house today except for a short walk around the block after lunch. Still got a lot accomplished but starting to feel the “blahs” set in. With nothing to really look forward to and now where to go, it can be really depressing to just get some work done at home. It’s not like I don’t have a lot to do, it’s just that the work is mainly maintenance.

The kids have some structure, but they probably need a little more. They are just wandering from one thing to another and spending a lot of time in front of screens. Tomorrow, we’re going to focus on getting the house cleaned and organized for our next week off. The problem is that even though it wasn’t raining today, it was really cold which meant we couldn’t go out much.

I think we’ve also decided that we really need to stay away from others and just stay quarantined for a few days, may be a week. Our neighbors work in the local hospitals and we’re a little worried that they or their kids could be bringing something home. It was good to hear yesterday that our other neighbor who passed away was immediately quarantined when they returned home from their trip where they had picked up COVID-19. We were a little worried that perhaps they had be out, going to the store, Starbucks, the gas station, etc., but it sounds like they were kept isolated. Still it’s a little scary when its so close.

Day 2

Charles Hoover
Zoom Video Conferencing

Today was pretty much like yesterday. A little of the excitement and adrenaline has gone out of it, but kids still did their school work, I still went in to school in the morning to work and we had a fairly relaxing afternoon.

I went in to school because I had my first video conference, a video conference that many of my colleagues were also new at. In my previous job, we often had video conferences, especially after 9/11. Our corporate headquarters were in Virginia so we either had to travel there for meetings or we could video conference, we chose the latter. It worked very well and as the Internet improved so did the quality of the conferences.

After I moved over to teaching, I’ve been trying to get my other teaching colleagues to start using video conferencing for our meetings especially when we were spread across the district, but to no avail. We had many excuses; “I don’t have a web cam”, “We don’t have have the same schedule”, etc. Now that we have all tried it and are scheduling another meeting for the week after “Spring Break”, I’m hoping we see the utility of using this technology going forward.

The app we are using, Zoom, is pretty good, and more than adequate. I’m not sure why everyone has landed on Zoom as the one to use for this since there are so many other choices out there, but I can’t complain about it. The one thing that I don’t plan on doing is having a Zoom with any students. If its a group that would be one thing, but one-on-one is just opening myself up for potential liability. I would like to check it out for creating how-to videos and see how it stacks up against Screencast-o-matic which I currently use.

Day 1

Charles Hoover
Image result for online classes

The first day of being on COVID-19 Break from school went pretty well. I started the day by going into school and getting some work done in preparation for if we happen to be out for another month. The beauty of making these kind of preparations is that they work even if we come back to school. Everyone was kind of freaking out about online learning, but I’ve been doing that with my classes for years. In fact, I believe this is the future of teaching. As technology gets more sophisticated, this will be the way most of us go to school or at least learn content in the future.

After that I came home and got my own kids started on their assignments. We are all mainly working in computers even though my middle-schooler brought home his iPad. Things just work much better on a PC or a laptop than on a tablet. Even a Chromebook, which I use for a lot of my work, is a better option than an iPad.

After we spent a few hours on school work, it was time for some board games. We played Settlers of Catan and Galaxy Trucker. Then it was time for dinner and a movie on Netflix. So overall not a bad day. Tomorrow is looking to be pretty much the same.

We are planning on working some exercise into our schedule so that we don’t spend most of the day on the computer. So far its feeling like any snow day or extended weekend, we’ll see after we’ve spent a week together.

Blogging Can Be Hard

Charles Hoover

I’m finally coming back to blogging after a long hiatus, mainly because my students are starting their blogs and it always gets me excited to keep blogging on my own. I was doing a pretty good job until around this time last year when my sister-in-law passed away and I had to go back to my childhood home to be supportive for my brother and mother. It kind of took the steam out of my writing and I could never get going again.

But now I’m ready to start again and see how much I can do going forward. I would like to continue with my 30-day challenges as a way to force myself to work on things that I really want to do but don’t because I always find some kind of excuse not to. I was doing pretty good with blogging everyday, and it was hard, but again I kind of lost steam when I had to go to Baltimore. So may be I can continue with that.

My real reason to blog, as it always has been, is to be a better writer and communicator. I feel like 10-15 years ago I was really pretty good at communicating my ideas and getting others to understand, but somewhere along the way I have lost some of those skills. A big part of it has been the problem of only communicating with middle school students on a regular basis. While they are awesomely creative and keep me on my toes, they don’t challenge my more adult intellect. So I need to find a way of interacting with more adults about a variety of subjects.

Chrome and LCARS

Charles Hoover

30 Days of Blogging: Day 16

Don’t know if this is Google’s plan, but I have noticed that the recent changes that Google has been making to Material Design, the format it is using for its apps, seems to be very similar to the Star Trek: The Next Generation layouts for computer displays called LCARS. Library Computer Access/Retrieval System or LCARS is the operating system that the computers use for Star Trek during the period when The Next Generation takes place. I would often get and use any type of app, font or layout that used this format back in the early 2000s. I would customize my Windows backgrounds, I even had a desktop background based on this and would rearrange my icons so that they would match up with the areas in the LCARS where someone would interact with those items.

This would be an interesting development and I don’t know if it’s tied into Google’s new operating system, Fuschia, but I would be all over it. I have always thought that LCARS was an interesting way to show and use data on a computer, much better than the linear method that we have been using since the early years. With its blend of graphics, text and touch screen I’m kind of surprised that other companies have not tried to create something similar. Now with all of the rounded corners, half circles, and whole circles, for the labels and other text boxes, it really looks like Google is moving in this direction.

I’ve look in the Play Store and in Chrome to see if anyone has developed something already for any of my devices and it looks like there isn’t a whole lot. So it will be interesting to see where Google takes this

Teaching is Like Standup

Charles Hoover

30 Days of Blogging: Day 16

I was watching an interview with Jerry Seinfeld this past weekend and he made a comment that when you do stand up comedy, you are testing your material every night. That’s exactly the way teaching works. I can sit down and come up with what I think is a killed lesson plan, follow all of the rules and use all of the strategies but in the end, it all comes down to the mix of students on a specific day and at the specific time. I can see why so many teachers are able to make the switch from teaching to stand-up and vice versa.

Teaching is a performance art and should be prepared for in much the same ways. Every morning I start prepping my class and my equipment so that I can put on my best show and entertain as I teach. I have tried planning classes where the students do most of the learning by reading and watching videos but that never seems to work. It can’t occupy their short attention spans. I usually try to switch things up every 12-minutes or so and those classes seem to work the best. Even on those days when I’m giving a test, I only let them work on the test in the last 15-minutes or so because if it was a whole period, they would go nuts.

I read once that when introducing new material or starting a new unit, teachers should treat it like the opening to a blockbuster movies. Start with something exciting that grabs their attention so that they hang on for the rest of the ride.  Much like a roller coaster, the first big drop is the best and the rest is just filler until the end. It’s hard to do that but when you start to think in those terms, lesson planning does become a little easier. I’ve also thought that planning a unit should probably follow the hero’s journey as laid out by Joseph Campbell so that its familiar for the students. And if I can make the students the hero in the journey, then so much the better.

The End

Charles Hoover

30 Days of Blogging: Day 15

Been thinking about death a lot recently. More so since my sister-in-law just had a heart attack and looks like she may not make it. But I’ve been thinking about it for at least a couple of years, since my Dad died. He was in his seventies and my grandfather was in his seventies so it is pretty likely that I won’t survive my seventies either. That gives me about 20 years if I’m lucky. 

I joke with my students at school when we talk about the future that they will be alive to see some of the changes: robots, AI, 3D printing bodies, downloading memories, etc., but I won’t be around to see any of that. But the reality is that it probably will be like that. I’ve also been more aware of it as I’ve been teaching my Health Class this year. Almost every day I’m reminded of how unhealthy of a life I’ve been living and while I have gotten better, I could do even more. I also think about my kids and when I realize that I may not see them married or see any grandchildren that makes me kind of sad.

It makes me also wonder if this is all there is or will there be something afterwards. I sorta believe that there is something beyond this existence and that I will eventually be reincarnated again to work on my next round of karma, but there is no proof, so what will it be? I’ve been reading recently some theories about quantum dynamics and the soul and the author makes a good argument, with some proof that our consciousness could be entangled with our past and future selves and this is how reincarnation works. Some of my own experiences have followed along with this reasoning so there could be truth there. But as usual, there is no way to find out until I’m gone.

Writing My Book

Charles Hoover

30 Days of Blogging: Day 15

I’ve been thinking of writing a book for a while now and I’ve been working out some of my ideas with some research. I want to write something along the lines of science fiction and I always like sci-fi books where there is some real science behind it or at least the concepts hold together even is the science isn’t entirely correct. I’ve been very underwhelmed by a lot of the new science fiction that I have been reading, nothing has been grabbing my attention and making it so that I can’t put the book down. The only thing that has been close had been some of the stuff by Peter Hamilton because his work really does hang together even if it is not always based on real science.

What I need to work on is to develop a method of working so that I can improve my writing. This blog is definitely helping. I feel as though I have been getting better at writing by practicing in this blog, but I also feel that the blog makes a lot of what I write one dimensional. It is mainly from my perspective and I’m not creating and developing characters or coming up with plots, story arcs and all of the other things that go along with writing a good story.

I invested in a Storyclock Notebook which comes at the whole idea of a story as a basic outline that follows some the work of Joseph Campbell. The outline is set up like a clock and your story just follows the hero’s journey as it travels around the clock. The method of the notebook suggests watching any movie, making a note of the time when each part happens and observing the patterns in different types of stories. Then you can use this knowledge with your own stories to develop a well-rounded narrative that doesn’t skip any steps in the story and helps you to develop out different parts.

I just need to practice myself and start working at it.