jumpingfish

There are many ways Google Classroom has been a game changer for teachers with remote students. On the other hand, after using it for almost two semesters, I can say that the Google approach to app development — build the bare minimum set of features to impress first-time users — leads to horrors. (Horrors, I tell you.)

Yet until now, I’ve kept my mouth mostly shut. After all, it was better than the alternatives. Mouth shut no longer.

Scenario: Suppose I want to delete all assignments from the fall semester. (I won’t go into why this is very important. Trust me; it is.) 

Question: How many mouse clicks does that take to accomplish this?

Answer: Here’s a back of the envelope calculation.

• To delete a single assignment takes 3 clicks.
• Multiply that times the number of assignments in a typical week: 4×3=12 clicks.
• Multiply that times the number of weeks for the semester. 16×12=192 clicks.
• Multiply that times six classes. 6×192=1152 clicks.

More than one thousand clicks to delete all the assignments. And of course there’s the scrolling that you have to do between every 3 clicks.

Google has no solution to this. And I have no plan to add some plugin from an unknown developer to automate this for me — all you have to do is give said unknown developer write-access to your Google Classroom. Not going to happen.

So many clicks, so little time.

We lamented our lack of corn bread.

Our New Year’s dinner was black-eyed peas and cabbage — a mighty tasty product of the fair and industrious Trudy. But we skipped the corn bread. 

“No corn bread this year,” Trudy said. “We would have just slathered it in butter and eaten it. You would have been unhappy.”

Sad but true.

That makes me think of pumpkin bread.

“Do you like pumpkin bread, Mr. Hasan?” a student asked.

I don’t recall what the context was. Had she made it? Was she giving it away to friends? Whatever it was, she had some that she was willing to share.

“I love pumpkin bread,” I said, “but no thanks. I try to minimize carbs.”

She looked at me for a moment and then said, “But what about your wife?”

 Humbled that such spousal sentiment would have to be suggested to me, I said, “That’s a fine idea! She will love it. Thank you.”

That makes me think of banana bread.

It was morning on a day during finals week. A student came in through the doorway.

“Mr. Hasan, do you want a banana bread muffin?” 

Remembering the pumpkin bread episode, I thought about the carbs and about Trudy, and then I said, “Thank you. I would love a banana bread muffin!” 

The student gave it to me and walked back into the learning community.

The bell rang. The other students looked up from their desks. I took the muffin out of the paper and bit into it.

“Sorry to eat in front of you,” I said, “but my coffee’s still hot, so I’m not waiting for this!”

1. The check-in questions

At the beginning of the year, all the students were remote — either online or working on “paper packets”. The online kids had several ways they could officially get marked present. (Attendance is a very big deal for some not-so-obvious reasons, as some of you undoubtedly know.)  

For my classes, the main way to be marked present was to answer my daily check-in question. (There were several other required ways, and there were record keeping procedures, and this all added up to making attendance during the opening weeks of the semester one of the most miserable tasks any of us had to deal with. …but I digress.)

Every day, I’d post a non-math question with a multiple choice answer. Okay, okay. Sometimes I asked math-y stuff. But usually these were silly questions with sillier answers. Frankly, I didn’t care how they answered, although it made for fascinating reading. All I needed to see what that they did answer. If they did, ✔︎.

2. They go away

But strange things happened.

A non-trivial number of our students came to the conclusion that the only thing necessary for online school was to be marked present. A shocking number of them would answer the check-in question and then disappear, do nothing else.

Nothing else, I tell you.

They wouldn’t watch the videos. They wouldn’t read the notes. The notes I was working so hard to tailor. With hand-drawn cartoon figures. With hand-written, multi-colored worked-out example problems. Which more often than not I was scanning in nightly at midnight. (And suddenly I am channeling Arlo Guthrie with his twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossssy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was.) They wouldn’t hand in homework. Some of them weren’t even taking tests. 

So when we started having in-school kids, I re-jiggered my classes so that the online kids joined a daily Zoom at the same time as the in-person kids came into our daily class. Everyone listened and watched at the same time (in theory). Zoom keeps a log of who joins, so I no longer needed check-in questions. Since then, I’ve been marking remote student attendance based on Zoom logs.

To get ready for that, for two weeks I told the kids that there was soon coming a day when the check-in questions would go away. And when that day came, the only way to be marked present would be to show up in Zoom.

3. The last question

On the day before the end, I sent out one last check-in question. It went something like this:  “Do you know that this is the last check-in question?” The possible answers were something like

• Yes Mr. Hasan. You’ve told us this every day.
• Yeah, whatever.
• Yes, and it’s about time!
• No. Wait. What?
• No. So do I still have to read Google Classroom?
• No. How do I get marked as present?
• All of the above.
• None of the above.

It was the last question. 

That evening I got a private comment from one of the kids who had just answered that last question. He had answered one of the Yes variants, and then he elaborated in a comment, “… but I did kinda like them.”

If you just ask, they will tell you.

She asked me if I had seen Jupiter and Saturn. They had been gazing skyward. The warming winters being what they are, I imagined them standing in their furrowed field in shirt sleeves in amaze at the star-strewn sky. Ours was cloudy, so my envy had to settle on an approximate conjunction the night before.

That was a week ago or so.

Tonight she asked if I had seen the full moon. She so puts my aerospace to shame. And again my envy had to be happy with a sighting last night as I took out some garbage, because this afternoon’s bluster blew in a solid deck of clouds and there is nothing to see.

“I wish you and I could sip coffee,” she said. “Swap stories and thoughts. That would be amazing.”

Indeed.

There is so much about this year that I want to ask her about. So much about students struggling. About reaching out. To encourage them. To make them smile. To maybe learn. There are so many things she could teach me. 

So yes, coffee. That would be amazing.

Did she ask about it? I don’t remember. She was standing at my desk in the front of the room, and somehow we started talking about my Google avatar. 

“It’s kinda me,” I said. “Do you know what he’s doing?”

She stared at it for a moment. “No.” 

“Saturday Night Fever?” I asked. “That help?”

“Um… no,” she said.

“John Travolta?”

“Oh,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “Isn’t he from Grease?”

So sad. Although truth be told it was only after I drew it that the Saturday Night Fever/Travolta interpretation suggested itself. 

“You’ll have to google it sometime,” I said.

She walked back to her desk.