Keeping a sense of humor

It was hilarious how badly one of my math classes went yesterday. It could have been on a sitcom. If it could have gone wrong, it did. I am just trying to laugh about it and will try again another day. Here is the series of events.

 I scheduled a zoom call with one of my middle school math classes. The plan was to begin the call at 2pm, but when I arrived at the school 5 minutes before 2, I realized that I left my school keys at home and was locked outside. I planned to use the white board, so I ran back up the hill to my house in order to get the keys. This time I drove down the hill in order to get back to school faster. Once I got inside and everything was set up, the internet was not working. I tried resetting the router, but that didn't solve the problem. I tried using my phone as a hot spot in the one location that usually gets a decent signal, but that did not work either. I quickly grabbed my laptop, math papers, a few small whiteboards and markers, jumped into the van and drove back up the hill to my house where the internet usually works better. I decided to set up outside at the table under our solar panels because it is a beautiful and quiet place. I finally got the Zoom call started and students slowly began to join. After a few minutes of greeting one another, we had four out of the five students participating so I prepared to begin the math lesson. 

At that very moment I started to feel bites. I looked down and realized that a group of safari ants were covering my legs, chair, shoes and school bag. I ran off-screen to remove my shoes and brush the ants off, but several had gone up my skirt and were biting me. I ran inside to not get rid of the ants under my clothes and then carefully went back out to get my computer, papers, whiteboards and markers. I found a quiet place inside to teach the lesson, and got through about 3 problems before I got the 10 minute warning from zoom that my session was about to be over. I made a plan to start a second zoom call with my students when this one shut down and got through a few more problems together. Of course this is a middle school class, so there were distractions such as face close-ups, silly drawings being held up and funny facial expressions. Most of these were from my son. 

After I set up a second Zoom call and invited all my students, only two of them were able to sign on, my son, who I could hear from the next room, and my neighbor who I had just seen that morning to talk about math.  It seemed like a waste of data for the three of us to video chat, so I finally gave up. 

While it was not a very productive hour or so, it was entertaining and gave me some good laughs. It was also good to see some of my students briefly. I hope that your day was more productive than mine, but if it wasn't, I hope you can at least laugh about it.