Slice of Life: No Need For LED (Frontline to the Fad)

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

I started noticing them in the Fall. Maybe you did, too, if you are a teacher. Whenever we were in our Remote Learning (as we are again, this week), a few kids at home would dim the lights in their rooms where they were working, so their faces became shadows and silhouettes, and a string of colored LED lights along the doorways and walls behind them would create an eerie glow in the room.

Pink. Blue. Green. Red.

Following the holidays, what had seemed like a sporadic trend has become a full-blown fad, and unfortunately, the students who need the quietest space and least distracted space for thinking, the ones on learning plans for a range of issues, the ones who are struggling with Remote Learning and need the most support … those students are the very ones who have the most LEDs blinking in their spaces.

I’ve asked some students to turn them off in the past, but we never had a blanket policy. I guess I want them to be able to make where they learn, their own, with their own bits of personality. I don’t mind the periodic dog or cat coming into the video window, or even the antsy child who sometimes gets up and shoots a nerf hockey puck before settling back in.

But the influx of colored lights means we may need to institute a “policy” on LED lights soon. What it makes me wonder is, what were the parents of these children — the ones who need more focus, and less distractions — thinking when they bought strings of LED lights for the space where their children would be doing schoolwork? It’s hard enough, for the students and for us, the teachers.

We never knows what’s going to be all the rage next, do we? But teachers have the frontline to fads.

Peace (lit up),
Kevin

One Comment
  1. This makes me think about the ways–even remotely–that kids try to stand out (originators of the fads) and how they want to belong (followers of the fads). Either way, fads connect them to each other. So interesting what doesn’t change, regardless of all the things that have changed with school this past year.

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