April 11, 2023
Our third year of operation at UP Academy was 2020-2021. If you are an educator you may have just gotten goosebumps thinking about that year. It was a year of Zoom school, a year of challenges, a year of unspoken trauma, and a year of illness and death.
It was also a year of changes, innovation, creativity, and of challenging the status quo in everything from how we order and eat at restaurants, to how we go to school. As a rebel educator, if there’s one thing I love, it’s challenging the status quo.
In the fall of 2020, our school was in person, in school, in our small and safe-ish community. But not because it was my decision. In year three we had a large enough community that we could connect with, so we could ask questions and let them lead.
Year 3: Never Decide Alone
In March 2020 when we closed our doors, we, like everyone else, went online. At first, it was a schedule that was modified from our school schedule, but pretty similar. That was too much time online. We changed it to have breaks between each class. That was too much…