The beginning of the year this year was anything but normal. The day before my family and I were scheduled to fly back to Hong Kong, this happened…
New Staff Orientation was supposed to start one week after, but due to Hong Kong’s COVID restrictions, I wasn’t able to return back to Hong Kong until 2 weeks after I tested negative because we wanted to ensure that we would not test positive at the airport and be sent into quarantine. This led to changing our flights around and going to different places and we returned to Hong Kong 3 weeks after our scheduled return date.
That wasn’t normal. However, the beginning of the school year started as if we were back in 2019. Teachers were on campus at the beginning of the year and students all came to school for face-to-face learning from day one. A huge thank you to my partner, Jane (@MsJanePYP), and Wendy Liao for making sure all the things that happened at the beginning of the year went smoothly.
Now that we are back and things are in full swing, I think we are all having similar thoughts thinking, is this how we start the year? How do we want to change it? Do things that we used to do still work or make sense after all that we have been through? And of course, “Will we be able to continue teaching and learning in person?”
Going with the assumption of, “Yes,” I’m excited to plan out projects that we have had to hold off on since 2019 (because we weren’t allowed to share physical resources in class) with my colleagues and give students new and fun challenges for the coming year. This year will also be a “not normal” year because my family and I are also relocating back to the US! So, we will hopefully be moving to the US mid-year (around March), so I will not be at my current school for the full year.
So here we go, a Normal, Not Normal year is starting!
Musings 