Last Tuesday was day 47, the last day of the third cycle of this academic year. It was also our second scheduled remote day of the cycle. Hoping to make the meeting a bit more fun and engaging I invited a 16-year-old Learner to facilitate the morning meeting. I did so because he had done a fabulous job facilitating a morning meeting two weeks ago and I felt we needed to get more energy out of the morning meeting. The Learner launched in with a great prompt: if you were any other animal what would you be? For those who showed up to the meeting on time the responses were pig, tiger, elephant, fox, human, crocodile, fish, sloth, lion, and bird. He then asked what practice each person was going to focus on and everyone but three people said they were going to drink water. Two said they were not going to use ableist language. The final Learner said play Roblox. Well, that’s not a practice we are working on but he joined the meeting late.

As the meeting ended I invited Learners to stick around and play a game of sudoku with me. The day before I had shared a screenshot on Discord of me solving the easy level in record time. One Learner pointed out that it was the easy level, and another Learner then posted a screenshot of him beating my time by a good margin. He later admitted that he cheated to get the score, but he stuck around to play the game with me. I was thinking we might play a medium or hard sudoku but he said that we should go straight for the expert level. That’s a risky proposition as an expert game can run close to an hour, and that’s if we don’t make any mistakes. Also, it is really hard to play the game over zoom because one person has to tell the person operating the game where to place numbers. Nonetheless, we were both super focused and we got it done in under a half an hour. I was impressed, and we were both pretty tired after the exercise.

I was super thrilled that Learner stuck around for the sudoku game because no one came to the two offerings I had planned for the day: planning and organizing, and free write. Granted, my offerings were not exactly fun games. But I found out no one attended Facilitator Lauren’s offerings either. Her offerings were definitely more fun: jam session, and gratitude scavenger hunt. It seems the Learners are quite content just hanging out with each other or their other friends online. As I think about next cycle I am thinking about offerings that I would enjoy hosting that they might find interesting, and about encouraging them to host see of their own offerings. I am also talking to some other Self-Directed Education communities to see if we can join efforts like we did last spring.

At the afternoon roundup only five Learners showed up. Have I said that I am not a fan of remote Learning? We checked in to see how the day went for each of us, and it was universally positive: good, good, good, pretty good, great, and great. I asked for feedback on why no one came to any of our offerings and the overarching themes were they were not interested or they did not like the offerings. We then asked them what their goals were for the week break and they had a wide variety of plans, but the best part about their plans is that they did not include large Thanksgiving day gatherings. Then we said goodbye to two Learners who are leaving the community. It is always sad having to say goodbye, and it is doubly sad when it has to be done remotely. I long for the days when we can all be together, again.