I will gladly pay you Tuesday

Entry 001

I didn’t have a catchy title to fit today’s content other than the fact that today is Tuesday. Perhaps we all don’t know when we will pay for everything we are dealing with now. The character in the feature image is the obvious inspiration for the title.

The core questions:

Credit goes to Ben and readers of his blog for these “Four Questions” and the five stretch questions.

1. What did you do today? Typical day. Woke up about 6am. Slept okay but woke up a couple of times during the night. Restless I guess? Checked in on email, social media and then prepared for my TC1028 9am class. We already had removed some topics from the course content (tuples and dictionaries in Python) so we are in the home stretch. I spent much of the class checking on the status of my students and sharing with them how I am doing. I love seeing their faces and hearing their voices.My morning session of #CoffeeTalks in Spanish (more below) followed and I did maintenance on this blog and some other tasks for the university.
   The afternoon session was a good discussion about our pivot to online with colleagues Gerardo and Gabriela.
2. What did you enjoy? A surprise guest dropped into the morning session of #CoffeeTalks. His name is Paco and is from the Valencia area of Spain. He came in via my colleague Gaby and the Tecnológico de Monterrey‘s “Global Classroom” program that connects educators globally with our faculty at the Tec de Monterrey. We had a great chat and I may do a talk for his university soon based on my experiences with online teaching.
3. What did you find difficult? Keeping a rhythm this morning. I have been practicing the Pomodoro technique for years and will probably lean into a more systematic use of that to get my pace back.
4. What has changed? Checked in with my brother today to see how he is doing and have had more communication with my sister as well. This isn’t to say we “weren’t talking” before, just that perhaps this covid-19 situation is creating the circumstances for us to be more in touch and reach out to each other.
   

   And then, the stretch questions:

5. What are you grateful for? My immediate family. My wife and children. Being around each other all day every day is not at all like our regular days. We are doing well and small arguments are kept in check.
6. Which changes do you want to keep? Mixing work with home life is rare for many and definitely for us. I have always had that view that I am “one Ken” and avoid the path others take of “Personal Facebook profile” separate from my “work profile”. I am a husband, a father, a brother, a friend, a colleague and a teacher all the time.On episode 301 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, guest Andrew Stenhouse spoke with the host Bonni Stachowiak about “Positive Work-Life Spillover”. I highly recommend the listen (and all the episodes; I was on one if you want to find it there). Andrew pushed back on the term “work/life balance” and talked about the term integration. I really identified with that.
7. What are you scared of? Work, job security. I have no immediate reason to fear this but as the main source of income to my household this obviously worries me. I worry more about colleagues though. I consider my position safe and feel that my administration appreciates all the work that I do for the institution, my students and colleagues.
8. What has stayed the same? I picked up a guitar again for probably the first time since 1993. I’m following the lessons at Justin Guitar and really appreciate his teaching and freely available content. Reminder to self to send him a donation.
9. When did you last laugh? This afternoon. A conversation about a brother in law and cars. Enough hint to myself there to recall the full details sometime in the future.

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