So in the weeks leading up to school, we were required to attend these webinars teaching teachers how to use our new online platform called K12 for MSO (My School Online). I think every single teacher knew from the get-go when we were having trouble accessing the live webinars that this was going to be a shit show. We were “talked at” for hours each day about a platform we didn’t even have access to try out. One of the facilitators for my group’s name is/was Honey. I kid you not. Now, I’m sure that Honey is a very nice person, however, listening to her drone on day in and day out about all of the intricacies of a platform that I couldn’t even access was annoying, to say the least, and earned her the name Honey Boo Boo within my circle of friends. I would get up each morning turn on the webinar via my tablet and check-in for the day. I would then turn the volume off or down and proceed with my own lesson planning. I preemptively set-up Google Classrooms for all of my classes and invited students one by one to my classroom. I sent about 130+ emails. I patted myself on the back and by the end of the torturous week of K12 learning, most of my students had joined the various Google Classrooms. Late on Thursday night/early Friday AM of the same webinar week, I finally got access to my K12 online classroom. I am telling you that I can set up my own router at home, I have set-up our laser printer to print via WiFi - I am somewhat tech competent - YET NOTHING PREPARED ME FOR THE SHIT THAT AWAITED ME ONLINE IN MY VIRTUAL CLASSROOM. Nothing made sense - there were about 10 different ways to accomplish the same task. Teachers from my district basically crowd-sourced help via FB to teach each other how to set-up our K12 accounts and classrooms. I had friends who were literally crying because of this foolishness. Even people who had paid attention and taken notes were having trouble. Again - some of this could have been avoided if for example - our district had decided to ask real teachers the best kind of learning platforms to use, but, No - some people who haven’t been in the classroom in years made that decision for us. OR - had we been able to have access to our real online classrooms at the same time as the webinars we could shadow the actions of Honey Boo Boo. But, again - NOPE. The first day of school arrived and I logged on at 6 AM for an 8:15 AM class. By the time 7:45 AM rolled around FB was filled with messages of the system crashing, teachers not being able to log in, parents of students not being able to log in. I was able to meet with my students for a few minutes - I never got sound to actually come out of my mic on the K12 version of Zoom - called Newrow. It should be called Never - because it Never worked. I sent my students a message and we met on Zoom. I had also gotten most of my kids to sign-up for Google Hangouts, and I posted links to Zoom there for the rest of the day. K12 was the disaster that we all imagined and more. They even copied the Amazon Apology Dogs and guess what - it was a free stock image easily found on Adobe Spark. God Bless the 11th-grade hacker who brought our district to its knees. While I was being a rebel and had already decided to give K12 the finger, it was “Lil Bro” who turned into the hero we didn’t know that we needed. By Thursday 9/3 - we were finally permitted to abandon K12 and start using MS Teams and Zoom. Our school district made the national news nightly for a week and still pops up now and then as a blurb and it is now 9/10. Our school board met last night until 2 AM where it was finally decided that K12 is done. And all I have to say to K12 is “Girl Bye”.