Ask me about blaseball and teaching in semi-rural New Zealand.

Tell me more about the world of online biology

(or whatever you did for the sick years)

I had the one Level 2 Biology class, where the kids do an assessment looking at zonation and ecology, another assessment where they show they can use microscopes and create correctly-formatted microscopic drawings of properly-prepared slides, and they have exams for genetics and cell biology. I can't even properly recall what we were working on during that first pandemic lockdown; I think it was cell biology. I vaguely recall doing my damnedest to explain the phases of meiosis while drawing stringy looking pink-and-blue chromosomes with a touchpad. My most salient memories of that time are:

• The morning of the first day of lockdown. I put my sheets through the laundry, and also put my phone through the laundry. The previously-mentioned neighbor was kind enough to let me into his bubble and lend his phone, so I could call the phone company and purchase a new one to be delivered.
  
• The education system was figuring out the sudden transition to online learning on the fly, so there was a good share of teething troubles. We set up Google Meetings and posted the links on our classroom webpages, and I guess someone saw the link up for my senior biology class, jumped in and without saying anything started streaming pornhub. I kind of sort of panicked and said "ok everyone out, I will send a new link for our class" because I don't think I was actually able to kick people.
  
• I think we made the juniors (who were looking at forces and motion) film themselves doing the trick where you've got an egg resting on a toilet paper tube above a glass of water, then knock the tube out and have the egg land safely in the water. Very few of them actually did it.
  

We were in full lockdown for four weeks; during this time if you weren't an essential worker you could go to the supermarket, head out on a stroll for fresh air, and that was about it. By the end of April, you still had to stick to your bubble, but the government wanted the economy to start ticking over again so juniors were allowed to come in if their parents needed them at school. Again, that was a pretty chill time because we were still doing lessons on Google Meetings, iirc teachers also did stuff like cooking lunch together for the small handful of kids who were doing "distance learning at school".

Mid-May, we had to do social distancing but things were mostly back to normal. A week into June, we pretty much had stamped out Covid within the country and were putting incoming travellers in Lurgy Jail (hotels in all the cities with international airports) for a couple weeks until they were either Covid-free, or caught it and got better from it. So for the rest of the school year, we were more or less normal except for going through copious amounts of hand sanitizer because those little shits loved to take the big classroom-sized bottles and "do science" with it.