The Internet is down… #SOL21 Day 24

On Tuesday morning, I was the first car to the middle school parking lot.  After an awesome morning walk, I was ready for a glorious day.  My car clock read 5:58 AM, and I knew that for the next two hours I was going to crank out a ton of work (planning, printing, grading, and prepping).  As I logged into my computer, I sensed something was wrong.  I could not print and I could not get to Google Drive.  The Internet was down.  Ugh!

When 8:00 AM rolled around and I had my first period science class in front of me, the Internet was still down.  No big deal.  We were going to do The Burning Candle lab and the Beads in a Bottle lab to introduce the chemistry unit.  I don’t remember doing this, but at some point over the weekend, I saved the reflection documents onto my desktop, so the kids took out some paper and we reflected the old-fashion way with a pencil.  This would happen in third and fourth period as well.  The classes were engaged and the discussions were insightful and awesome.  The problem: The remote students were not getting the same information.  This means making videos of everything that we did when the Internet was back up.  Thank goodness that I had time at 11:30 AM.

11:30 AM came and went and STILL the Internet was down.  In ELA class, we were supposed to finish the mythology unit with the reading (a play) of Jason and the Argonauts.  The kids were so excited for our second myth/play with their classmates on Zoom.  The Internet was still down.  We read the play as a class, but we missed the ten students that usually are with us via Zoom.  And, it was another video that I would have to create for the students that missed the class.  Thank goodness that I had a few minutes at 1:45 PM.  I could at least get one video created and posted.

1:45 PM came and went and STILL the Internet was down.  Finally, at 2:15 PM, the Internet was back.  Unfortunately, I had kids in the classroom, so the videos would have to wait until the end of the school day.  I was preparing myself for a thirty minute video session when I received an email that the faculty meeting (that was canceled) was back on.  Ugh!  After eight hours of no Internet, thirty-eight emails from students wondering about class (they all stated that they knew the Internet was down but was hoping that I would get the email and get back to them during or right after class = still scratching my head about this), and a faculty meeting, I was leaving work with a ton of work to do.

I made up for my missed time on Zoom with a two and half hour Zoom board of education meeting (my second one of the week and it is only Tuesday:).  After cranking out an hour of school work, I was cooked.  It was time for bed.  My last thoughts of the day were about how we, the teachers, have been told to put everything on the Internet, but today, there was NO PLAN when the Internet was down.  Ugh!