jumpingfish

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. 

That day I said something about my father’s childhood. Perhaps the story about counting the cattle when they came back through the gate at the end of the day.

After class, a student came up to the desk. He looked at me through the light of the document camera.

“I thought you were Hispanic,” he said.

“You did?”

“… because of how you pronounce our names,” he said.

I nodded. And glowed on the inside.

“…and”

I looked up.

“…because of the color of your skin.”

I nodded. And glowed on the inside.

1. An Activity

What was it that day? Maybe there was a planned fire alarm. Or maybe a lot of kids were out testing. Whatever it was, we didn’t have a lesson. We had an activity, instead.

In the morning, I had cut strips of blue paper for the in-person students — two inches wide, 11 inches long. Three strips for each. For those on Zoom, I had posted instructions on what tools they’d need, how to make their own strips, how to get ready for what we were going to do.

“Do this,” I said. They followed what I was doing under the light of the document camera. We made a loop out of one of the strips, taping it together at the end. Then we drew a pencil line down the strip until they got back to where they started.

We agreed to the non-controversial conclusion that the paper had two sides: one side with the line, the other without it.

“Now do this.” We made a different kind of loop from another strip, twisting it just before taping the ends together. “And draw another line.”

“No way!” someone in the back of the room said. We had arrived at the odd conclusion that the paper no longer had two sides. Without picking up their pencils, they had drawn a single unbroken 22 inch line that somehow traversed what used to be the two sides of the paper: a Möbius strip.

2. Scissors

With a spritz of disinfectant and a paper towel, the kids grabbed scissors from a basket as I walked around the room. (They’re high school kids, but they still love using scissors.)

Together, we cut down the middle of the Möbius strip. Again, someone in the back got it: “Cool!” One big twisted loop.

Finally, we made a third strip but this time cut it not down the middle but off to one side. It pushed the limits of their scissor-hand dexterity. 

I was asking them to tell me what they thought was going to happen when voice in the back of the room shouted, “Wow!” and held up their result: two twisted, interlocked loops. A Möbius chain?

3. Feedback

Who knows what the Zoom kids thought.

I can never tell whether they’re even really there. Some obviously aren’t, since they don’t sign off at the end of class. And some seem to be. But how can you tell what they really think — of the lessons, of the problems, of today’s activity?

Then at the end of the day, a student email showed up in my inbox.

“Hi Mr. Hasan. I want you to know that I participated today.” And they attached this picture. “This was fun.”