Quandary of quando, quando, quando

I woke up this morning to a Whatsapp from the parent of one of my grade 6's asking if I can set her some work and requesting me to have a phone call with her daughter as apparently she really misses me. I am trying to prepare for school next week so having to set additional work beforehand is a bit of a burden. I guess I should be flattered that her daughter misses me so much. I don't think some of my other students would ever want to speak to me because they miss my voice.

My aunt said that South African schools are to remain closed until at least June. Really not sure what ED's thinking and decision will be. Must say I am a little nervous to launch back to full time teaching when the number of infections here is still going up. A friend who has just had major surgery here said her specialist said there are way more cases of Corona in Zim than are being reported and people really do need to be careful. At the same time though I don't know what government and rural schools with no internet are going to do. Our one option is to produce work packs for our students that the parents pick up at the beginning of the week and then return to pick up more work at the end of the week. This is quite a different kettle of fish to being fully online and the two require quite different means of preparation. I am basically just organising my worksheets and having some work that I can either email/post online or print out. There's not much more I can do. Doing lessons via Zoom is another thing and then using all the other software I have been looking at. Many of my students are not good at keeping on top of home work so I worry as to whether work will actually get done and I don't think we'll get through as much work as we would ordinarily with normal school hours.

I have eight out of ten of my students supposed to be writing high school entrance exams this term too. I might have to scan all the past papers we have as I only have 2018's papers in digital format. I also have to figure out how my students are going to submit their work and how I go about grading it. I think next week is going to be a lot of work and I am going to work harder than I have in a long time. It's not only grasping a new system but having to remember to think about so many things at once.