Monday was our first day of the week, our first day of the fifth cycle of the pandacademic year, and it was the first day of 2021. It was also our first day being entirely remote as the county moved to risk stage level five on December 23rd. So we came together excited to be together again, but disappointed that we do not get to come together in person given the state of the pandemic.
With 15 total participants (although some joined late and some dropped off early) it was going to be a challenge to keep the morning meeting short, so I reminded folks to please stay muted if they were not speaking and to hold off on side conversations. Of course when folks haven’t seen each other for two weeks (or months if they were in different cells) sometimes the urge to just speak to others can take over. So I tried to gently remind them to use chat or Discord or wait until the end of the meeting for those conversations. As a last resort I would make use of the mute option.
Also, with so many participants we could not spend as much time checking in with each person, so they each briefly mentioned how they were feeling or how their holiday break went: good, good, fine, good, okay, breathed, rough, pretty alright, kinda interesting, good, doing well. One Learner just fell to the side and off screen which I took as either being exhausted or not wanting to share.
We quickly moved into the Set-the-Week meeting. Set-the-Week is how we collectively decide how we are going to structure the week, but it is something that we have not been doing this year as we’ve been outside and offerings outside tend to be much more spontaneous than they are when we are indoors (non-pandemic times) or fully remote. The Set-the-Week during this remote period allows us to schedule offerings and one-on-one check-ins around the meetings everyone in the community is expected to participate in (morning meeting, afternoon roundup, Set-the-Week, and the weekly Check-in and Change-up).
Set-the-Week
Offerings are simply invites for others to participate. No one is required to attend an offering and sometimes no one shows up to an offering. That is feedback that can help the host to decide to keep it open for people to drop in on in the future, to change up the schedule to make it easier for people to come, or to remove the offering altogether. Each Facilitator put up a variety of offerings throughout the week that would allow for the Learners to drop in and participate in something the Facilitator was interested in doing. My offerings for the week include a daily 7-minute workout, a daily free write, and a 2021 visioning / resolution workshop on Monday.
Two Learners proposed offerings for Monday, with one of them requesting that his offering be listed daily for the entire week. One wanted to have a Roblox offerings start at 10:30 a.m., right after the Set-the-Week, and another wanted to start an Among Us offering at 11:00 a.m. Each offering would require Learners to drop into different Discord channels.
The Roblox offering was led by an 8-year-old Learner, with two older Learners dropping in to play. There was some confusion as to whether or not they would play together, or if they were just going to play their own Roblox games while sitting on the same Discord channel, with the latter being the intention of the Learner who was leading the offering. Both of the Learners who dropped in eventually found their way over to the Among Us offering which was led by a 14-year-old Learner who was in his first day at Abrome.
Some of the Learners who dropped in for Among Us
Among Us is a multiplayer game and over the span of two hours a total of seven people joined the game. A much better turnout than I have ever had for one of my offerings. I was told that the game was really engaging and that it was made even more fun by a 16-year-old Learner constantly trying to throw people off by asking questions that made them question their assumptions. For example, he would deceive other players by saying, “it’s not about the past, it’s about the future!” as he led them away from the logical path they were going down. A 14-year-old Learner kept working out his logic out loud, which made the deceiver’s work all that much harder. Apparently it was a blast of a game, and I’m expected to join in on Tuesday.
7-minute workout
I had my 7-minute workout scheduled for 10:45 a.m., during the time that the Roblox offering was being held. It was a more challenging workout than I remember, and I tweaked my knee, but at least I was not doing it alone. It’s a daily offering so we will give it another go on Tuesday.
I had our oldest Learner show up for my 2021 visioning / resolution workshop, and we decided the best way to spend our time was to come up with goals in different categories: academic/intellectual, professional, health, relationship, and financial. We had also considered other categories such as spiritual and environmental. We discussed what makes goals helpful, and then we listed out three goals for each category. We then went back and pulled out the one goal from each category we were most intent on accomplishing, and highlighting other goals that we wanted to focus on during the year. Then we worked on making the clears more specific and putting dates on when we would like to accomplish the goals by. We circled back around to the daily tracker that the Learner and I worked on in December. The challenge will be following through on accomplishing the goals now given that New Year’s Resolutions rarely tend to stick.
Next I had my free write offering which no one showed up to, so I wrote by myself. At the same time Facilitator Lauren had a dance party offering. Facilitator Ariel and a Learner showed up for that party, and they spent it listening and dancing to some of the Learner’s favorite music. There was dancing, but it was seated dancing. We are hoping that an 8-year-old Learner who loves to dance will show up at the next one so that she can get people out of their seats.
Later in the afternoon Facilitator Ariel had an offering for Learners to grab their dogs and join him on a walk while chatting over Discord. No one showed up to that offering either. Then, at 3 p.m., all three Facilitators came together to discuss Akilah S. Richard’s Raising Free People. It is a book that we’ve handed out to all of the Abrome families (and families who have had Learners shadow), and that the book group that I lead at the local library has recently read. While all three of us have read the book, we are doing a slower read through the book and discussing it twice a week for the three weeks of this cycle. We only gave ourselves a thirty minute block to discuss the book, but it was a lively discussion and we all felt good about the amount of time that we will allocate to it this cycle.
Afternoon roundup
At the end of the day the Learners and Facilitators came back together again for the afternoon roundup. Each of them told the group what the best part of their day was: Among Us, Minecraft, getting new nail polish, playing two rounds of Among Us, petting her pet dog, selling something on Rogue Lineage, watching the livestream of Among Us, the goal setting workshop, not feeling gross (relative to their feeling that morning), Among Us, Among Us, and no one showing up for Roblox. That last one was not exactly the best part of the day, so I asked the Learner about it. That’s when two other Learners said they did show up for it, and they explained that it was unclear how they would all be together without playing the same game. It allowed the Learner to more clearly articulate his vision for how he would like the offering to play out next time, and he was encouraged to give it another shot sometime. We then covered the offerings that were scheduled for Tuesday, and told the Learners that we looked forward to coming back together again tomorrow.