Hot water along the coast of South America has led to abnormal weather patterns this year, in a phenomenon known as “El Nino.” In response to this unusual weather, teachers at EHS have started planning for the possibility of an E-Learning Day in the near future.
With the district’s new ability to issue an E-Learning Day in lieu of a snow day, teachers are trying to adapt to this change quickly to get ahead of the storm.
One way teachers are trying to adapt is by keeping their lesson plans flexible.
“I put a [Teams] link into my Schoology so that if I need it, I can use it,” social studies teacher Sairee Knabe said “…for making plans next week, I kind of made sure that whatever was there was something that I could easily transition and use remotely if I needed to.”
According to science teacher Marvin Allen, it’s harder to adapt activities that are hands-on or lab-based for remote learning, so he’s taking a different approach.
“If an E-Learning Day happens on a lab day or an activity day, something that doesn’t lend itself to E-Learning, I plan on using [those days] as opportunities to teach some of the ideas from physics that I don’t normally get to cover in class,” Mr. Allen said. “Things like electricity… the ideas behind quantum mechanics, dark matter, dark energy.”
And as competition seasons loom closer for certain extracurricular groups, some teachers are planning not just for their classes, but for the groups they’re in charge of as well.
In the case of Ethics Bowl, the team coaches, English teachers Cara Lane and Kirk Schlueter, have made plans to ensure that the team’s regular practices are held, whether an E-Learning day is called or not.
“It required a conversation between myself and Mrs. Lane about how we would handle things,” Mr. Schlueter said. “[We handed] materials out to Ethics Bowl members, so everyone is prepped early.”
According to tech coach Carry Bailey, the tech department has seen that in the two weeks that we’ve been back from break, there has been a noticeable surge of teachers creating bad weather contingency plans.
“One of the most common questions asked when [teachers] walk through [the tech department] door and when we visited last week is ‘Can you show me how to get my teams link into Schoology?’” Mr. Bailey said. “I think that’s the most consistent way that every teacher in our building at least is going about it is taking that link, putting it into Schoology and make sure they know how to access that on an E-Learning Day.”
According to Mrs. Knabe, this sudden onset of concern is being promoted both by the administration issuing reminders of the new E-Learning policies to teachers at the end of the break and by discussions between teachers about the encroaching threat of poor weather conditions.
“[Wednesday] during our PLC, I talked to all the other U.S. History teachers about the likelihood, so I’d say within departments people are probably talking about it,” Mrs. Knabe said.
Mr. Bailey agreed that teachers talking to each other about the possibility of a snow day helped push teachers to start preparing for E-Learning days.
“Sometimes we’re little kids too, and we watch the news like ‘Oh, a snow day! Maybe it’s going to snow!’” Mr. Bailey said. “When you guys are talking about it, we’re probably talking about it in the lunchrooms, too.”