Snow day!

It snowed last night! Almost a full inch, this of course meant that schools were closed today, giving me and Zena a day off. I love the snow, not so much playing in it, though that is fine too, but I like how it quiets everything down and covers everything in a single color. I think it has something to do with my anxiety issues, it makes everything much easier to process when the world is monochromatic and sounds are muffled. Plus the whole keeping people from going outside bit.

I want to move to a place with more snow but my wife is vigorously opposed to the idea, which is fine, it isn't a dealbreaker or anything, but perhaps someday I'll at least have the money and freedom to visit that kind of weather now and again.

Given the freedom to choose my ideal living situation might be an isolated cabin in a snowfield with an incredibly well stocked pantry and a high speed internet connection, but maybe it's for the best I don't have the only say in my living arrangements.

The snow day was super convenient for me, today is the coding class I teach that I least like dealing with. Coding With Kids partners with various after school programs, in Portland a major one is SUN school, the host a series of after school classes at lots of local schools, primarily in lower income areas and their services are... hit or miss. I teach at two of them, both in North Portland, one is fine, the kids are mostly engaged with the lessons and there is support and equipment from the school and program, the other is... not.

Coding With Kids has some policies, one is that we have a pretty strict 8 students to 1 teacher limit, for those of you who are teachers I know this sounds like the height of luxury and I guess it is, but that is the policy and when dealing with kids who might have sixteen different questions at once it is pretty nice to have another person. Which means it was unsettling when I found that the SUN program had added two more people to my class for a total of 18, this is especially hard when my co-teacher is unable to get to the class on time and arrives twenty minutes late, again, SUN was supposed to give me an additional person to help cover that time, but that hasn't happened. My other problem is that the grade range is 3-5 but they decided to move about 6 1-2nd graders in as well, it's pretty hard to teach a lesson to a class that with experience ranging from "can barely read to "Knows more than the curriculum can teach". I complain, my bosses say they'll talk to the school, and then we repeat.

But even if that weren't the case the class would be hard because these kids don't want to be there, the majority of my class is there involuntarily, see, SUN is often used as post school child care, which means the kids aren't actually wanting to be there, so they pick classes that they think will be the most fun, like basketball, but those classes fill up and then SUN decides where the overflow goes, and most of it seems to have gone to me. I can't blame the kids, this particular school spends a lot of effort on tech education during the day, so they don't want to spend another hour or so doing more of it in the evening, they want to play basketball or Fortnite or watch Youtube videos or whatever. They don't want to build games in Scratch using lessons most of them learned months ago and that is really hard to argue with.

A few do of course, one kid in particular I think likes having the excuse to put headphones on and putter around on Scratch rather than attempt to engage with the rest of the crowd, and the younger kids are more or less interested in trying stuff out, but that is maybe half the class at best, and the younger ones shouldn't even be there in the first place.

Point is, I was relieved when they cancelled school for the day because it is the only class I do not look forward to, not the kids fault, but there we are. I am also fairly excited by the ten day forecast which also thinks we might see snow again next Tuesday, so crossing my fingers there.