The Joys of Working From Home
So far I haven't had wodges of time to do All the Isolation Activities, such as baking, sewing or even finishing up the unpacking (tsk, we've been here since the beginning of February). This is because, in between feeding the family and keeping the house running, I've been trying to work out how to keep my job going when I'm unable to teach students in a face-to-face environment.
WHO? Well, at this stage, definitely only my current students, because I need, if I'm shouting into a void, to have a clear picture of who I'm teaching, and what their abilities are. But there are the sub-categories within my current student base. Adults vs Kids for example. I'm ignoring the kids for now (they're all technically on school holidays so I have a little leeway) because it's simpler for me to test this all out on the grown-ups first. Also, let's face it, I'm terror-procrastinating on the kids because I genuinely don't know what will be the best way to teach them, given that it will be difficult to guide their technique remotely. Within the adults I've had to work out a way of consolidating a few classes - I currently teach 10 adult classes per week, and I've managed to refine that into 6 online classes, to save me time and effort. But sorting all that out, and working out WHAT I needed to teach all those people has been taking up space in my brain, which is already crowded with HOW to deliver the classes, and just general Covid-19 anxieties, as well as thinking about what to cook for dinner each night BECAUSE WE'RE VEGETARIAN NOW and I don't really know how to do that. (It's going well though, super yummy and hitting all the daily nutrient targets etc. It just needs more thought because it's new. It started because Jake watched that doco on Netflix and also has some vegetarian friends, and I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to try it, for nutritional and environmental reasons. I haven't totally forsworn meat, but I'm not missing it. Sean and Steve still have meat when we have takeaway meals, but are happily consuming the [delicious] vegetables I serve up every night)
The HOW has been the really complicated part and has taken a couple of weeks to set up to my satisfaction. Most of my students said they'd prefer a pre-recorded class rather than a live one, to my relief. Having done a little bit of work with live-streaming, I've found our home internet is not up to the job. We may still have some live catch-ups because we miss each other, but they'll be talking ones, where glitches and lags don't matter as much.
Once I made the decision to proceed with pre-records, I then had to get to grips with the technicalities involved. So. I have now got a tap board on a foam mat in my bedroom, which I can slide under our bed when not in use, and I've angled the mirror just so, marked where the tripod for the good camera needs to sit, worked out how to record in mp4 format, and remembered that we had a laptop with windows operating system - more compatible with the good camera - that I could use. (It was Steve's late father's laptop, put to one side during the mammoth job that Steve did cleaning up his dad's house after Pa's sudden unexpected death from a massive heart attack in February last year. [And then just as the dust was settling from that, boom! our landlords decided to sell our Sparkly St house and we had to find a new place in a tight market in a very short timeframe. HOWEVER!! I now think that moving house has been an unexpected blessing - and if you knew how cranky I was at being forced to move over Christmas you'll know that this is a massive flip in my attitude - because our new place is a MUCH better option for living in isolation. The boys have their own rooms, we have more space, a better garden, a bigger garage for Steve -when he sorts out all his stuff- and the rent is $50 a week cheaper, plus we have a secure 12-month lease.] Thankfully Pa had not password-protected his laptop so I was able to open it and get straight to work. A photo of him pops up when I start the laptop, one that I think I took, which was like a little punch in the guts the first time I used it, but now is quite nice, makes me feel a bit as if he's keeping an eye out for us)
The next hurdle in HOW was getting the files from the laptop to the internet, and lordy that's been hard. At home it can take 12 hours to upload one 35 minute video. So I'm now paying to go somewhere with fierce internet, and even that is taking ages. I am running one live class a week, on Facebook, a non-tap dance fitness class called Legs-11 which I had been teaching for about a year to some of the women I met at my now-defunct Older Ladies Gym aka Curves North Fitzroy. This seems to be going well enough although we've had the odd internet drop-out, so I'm going to try teaching it from the fancy studio with fierce internet, on the same day that I upload my videos. Killing two birds with one stone as it were.
Today I sent out all the emails explaining it all to the tap students, and now (I hope!) they'll sign up, and it'll just be maintenance. I have already received some term fees and some encouraging messages from students, so that's all good. But phew! It's been very intense. I'm hoping once I sort out the kids' classes my life will feel more manageable.
In other Life During Plague Time news it's now common to see people queuing in the street just to go into a supermarket. How will this be acceptable when its full winter time?
And police cars are driving through public parks dispersing any people who are sitting down. EXERCISE ONLY!!
Obviously thank goodness for the internet. But it's not as simple as record a class and give it to the world wide web. There's who, what, where, how and why to consider first and that has taken a lot of brainspace to navigate. Obviously, WHY is the simplest: I need money, and I need to dance to stay sane. And I do think my students need it too, although we'll see if that pans out in the long run. It is the other 4 parts of the equation have been much more difficult.
WHO? Well, at this stage, definitely only my current students, because I need, if I'm shouting into a void, to have a clear picture of who I'm teaching, and what their abilities are. But there are the sub-categories within my current student base. Adults vs Kids for example. I'm ignoring the kids for now (they're all technically on school holidays so I have a little leeway) because it's simpler for me to test this all out on the grown-ups first. Also, let's face it, I'm terror-procrastinating on the kids because I genuinely don't know what will be the best way to teach them, given that it will be difficult to guide their technique remotely. Within the adults I've had to work out a way of consolidating a few classes - I currently teach 10 adult classes per week, and I've managed to refine that into 6 online classes, to save me time and effort. But sorting all that out, and working out WHAT I needed to teach all those people has been taking up space in my brain, which is already crowded with HOW to deliver the classes, and just general Covid-19 anxieties, as well as thinking about what to cook for dinner each night BECAUSE WE'RE VEGETARIAN NOW and I don't really know how to do that. (It's going well though, super yummy and hitting all the daily nutrient targets etc. It just needs more thought because it's new. It started because Jake watched that doco on Netflix and also has some vegetarian friends, and I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to try it, for nutritional and environmental reasons. I haven't totally forsworn meat, but I'm not missing it. Sean and Steve still have meat when we have takeaway meals, but are happily consuming the [delicious] vegetables I serve up every night)
The HOW has been the really complicated part and has taken a couple of weeks to set up to my satisfaction. Most of my students said they'd prefer a pre-recorded class rather than a live one, to my relief. Having done a little bit of work with live-streaming, I've found our home internet is not up to the job. We may still have some live catch-ups because we miss each other, but they'll be talking ones, where glitches and lags don't matter as much.
Once I made the decision to proceed with pre-records, I then had to get to grips with the technicalities involved. So. I have now got a tap board on a foam mat in my bedroom, which I can slide under our bed when not in use, and I've angled the mirror just so, marked where the tripod for the good camera needs to sit, worked out how to record in mp4 format, and remembered that we had a laptop with windows operating system - more compatible with the good camera - that I could use. (It was Steve's late father's laptop, put to one side during the mammoth job that Steve did cleaning up his dad's house after Pa's sudden unexpected death from a massive heart attack in February last year. [And then just as the dust was settling from that, boom! our landlords decided to sell our Sparkly St house and we had to find a new place in a tight market in a very short timeframe. HOWEVER!! I now think that moving house has been an unexpected blessing - and if you knew how cranky I was at being forced to move over Christmas you'll know that this is a massive flip in my attitude - because our new place is a MUCH better option for living in isolation. The boys have their own rooms, we have more space, a better garden, a bigger garage for Steve -when he sorts out all his stuff- and the rent is $50 a week cheaper, plus we have a secure 12-month lease.] Thankfully Pa had not password-protected his laptop so I was able to open it and get straight to work. A photo of him pops up when I start the laptop, one that I think I took, which was like a little punch in the guts the first time I used it, but now is quite nice, makes me feel a bit as if he's keeping an eye out for us)
The next hurdle in HOW was getting the files from the laptop to the internet, and lordy that's been hard. At home it can take 12 hours to upload one 35 minute video. So I'm now paying to go somewhere with fierce internet, and even that is taking ages. I am running one live class a week, on Facebook, a non-tap dance fitness class called Legs-11 which I had been teaching for about a year to some of the women I met at my now-defunct Older Ladies Gym aka Curves North Fitzroy. This seems to be going well enough although we've had the odd internet drop-out, so I'm going to try teaching it from the fancy studio with fierce internet, on the same day that I upload my videos. Killing two birds with one stone as it were.
Laggy glitchy still from live facebook class
Sunset through the nice round window in our new house
In other Life During Plague Time news it's now common to see people queuing in the street just to go into a supermarket. How will this be acceptable when its full winter time?
People queuing to get into Piedimonte's on Easter Saturday
And police cars are driving through public parks dispersing any people who are sitting down. EXERCISE ONLY!!
Steve and I were sitting in the park drinking our takeaway coffees and observing this while trying to work out if we were in breach. As we are from the same household and were technically exercising (we'd ridden our bikes to the park and were about to ride home) we thought we wouldn't cop the $1652 fine, but we didn't hang around to find out.
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