I teach twenty hours a week at my neighborhood elementary school. Every weekday, I walk the two minutes to the school where my daughters attended. I pull gifted and talented students from their classrooms for eighty minutes of math and thirty minutes of Language Arts. Then over their lunch break, I run just about every club the school offers to any student interested. Mondays it is the Spelling Bee for 3rd-5th. Tuesday we have Writer’s Club. Wednesday I actually get to leave early. Thursday is Battle of the Books for 4th and 5th. After school on Mondays 3rd-5th graders can join me for Chess Club. Tired yet? Oh and Character Club met after school too. And that’s only HALF of what the full time teachers do!
I remember one afternoon this March walking out of the portable where my classroom is located. I crossed the parking lot to head home on a warm, sunny day and felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Fifteen years before, I thought my teaching days were over. Our first daughter entered the world. I was as-happy-as-a-retired schoolteacher to stay home and watch her grow. Once that little girl and her sister (who followed along three years later) both started school, melancholy crept in.
We would shop for back to school supplies, but I didn’t get any.
We would pick a first day of school outfit, but I didn’t need one.
So when the opportunity to teach again came up, I interviewed with a passion. Then here I was a year and a half later living the dream. I walked home that day with a spring in my step and a smile on my lips.
The very next day the district announced that school was shutting down until further notice. We were one week out from spring break so it seemed like a two-week hiatus was a good precaution in a pandemic world. Call me clueless, I expected to be back in a month.
Then, we got the call to come in on a Saturday to clean out our students belongings. We would be starting Online School after break. It was wonderful to see the other teachers even through masks and gloves. We worked the designated six feet apart. We placed all the students’ left-behind belongings into large trash bags with their names on them, pulling library books as we went.
Then, two days of online self-paced video training began. For someone who usually spends her day interacting with students and colleagues face to face, this caused brain fatigue I’d never experienced before.
I set up my at home classroom (pictured above) complete with a mini sloth corner like we had in person. The first week we were told to focus on social emotional learning. We showed each other special items from our at-home classroom spaces. I emailed six different emoji faces for students to print and hold up to show me how they felt each day. We taught students how to use google classroom, flip grid, and other online resources. Teachers were the “experts” with only a two day head start.
To say that it went without a hitch would be…false. The second day during our class hangout, my microphone shut off. The students and I could see each other. I could hear them but they couldn’t hear me. I frantically typed into the chat box that I was trying to fix it. A message popped up on my screen telling me what to do. When I followed the directions, it kicked me out of the call! I immediately completed the steps to get back in. I came back just as a student said, “She’s gone. Let’s do something!” Thankfully I was able to squelch that mischief.
Partial engagement by some students was another hazard that came up. Sometimes all I could see was a boy’s forehead and the ceiling of his dining room. One day another boy’s face glowed in changing colors as he looked, not at me, but above me. I called him out and asked, “What are you watching, Cody?” (name changed)
He startled and said, “Nothing.”
Several minutes later while the students were working individually on a math problem, he set his computer down to go somewhere. (Also not allowed.) The camera was aimed directly at the television which was on! I called to him and got no response. I kicked him out of our call and let the rest of the class know that it was not okay to have the TV on during a meeting. Just last month they could attend school seven hours a day, thirty minutes shouldn’t be too much of a burden.
Another time, a girl was video recording her response to a prompt and behind her was a mirror. In the mirror, her mom was folding the laundry. Mom had no idea she was on camera. Thankfully is wasn’t the underwear!
When presenting, you lose the ability to see the participants or the chat. I would assign a student to be the chat reader for me and announce if anyone raised their hand with a question. A problem would be assigned, solved in their journal, then typed into the chat. One day the same student entered his answer ten times! Others hopped on the bandwagon and our chat had over 200 entries in just a few minutes time. After that, they had to hold up their work to the camera!
Once we got over the kinks and confusion, we actually did seem to learn something. It may have been only half of what we could have accomplished together, but all was not lost. It was fun to see students in their home environments, even when they changed from day to day.
Teaching is about relationships and even this year they were built. It just happened to be the weirdest and unique way I’ve ever experienced.