September 21, 2020
Well, it was hard to imagine how teaching could be harder than it was last spring. We were all swept out of our school buildings by the Coronavirus, COVID-19 and sent home. First it was to be two weeks, enough time for everyone to isolate and try to keep the virus at bay. But this virus is nothing like anything we have dealt with in my lifetime, or in the lifetimes of almost anyone alive. Two weeks stretched into a month, then 6 weeks, and at the end of April, the Governor finally acquiesced to the circumstances and stated that school would not return to in-person learning for the rest of the 2019-2020 school year.
The state of confusion in March 2020 was so intense that it took everyone weeks to find our way. I instinctively reached out to my students, sure that if I was this confused and isolated, they must be struggling too. That first week, almost all of my students arranged to meet with me on Zoom at least once a week; most met more often, and several asked to meet every day. Those meetings were a lifeline for me and for my students during the early days of quarantine and isolation. They allowed me to structure my time, and gave my students a fixed point in the day that helped record the passage of time. But, there was not a lot of real learning happening in the early days. Students were sleeping late, playing lots of video games, and all the while, the state told us that we couldn’t teach new content until we could figure out how to get everyone access to classes and curriculum. In the midst of that, there were fears that Zoom would not be secure enough for our purposes, so we were told we would need to use a less-user-friendly video calling platform called Microsoft Teams. I had just gotten my students acclimated to using Zoom when I needed to teach them and their families a whole new platform for connecting. There were articles about “Zoom-bombing” and other disruptions to the online learning experience. These disruptions scared many from trying to use video chats to connect with students at all.
Over the course of the spring, the educational directives evolved. First, we were allowed to meet with students, but not to teach anything new or provide direct services. Nor could we grade students for completion or non-completion of work. Next, we were encouraged to provide resources online to help students work on their goals and objectives, but we still were not supposed to teach students directly on our calls. Finally, after four weeks, we had permission to create the first assignments that students could be required to complete. Understandably, some students were completely out of practice with doing homework and classwork assignments after a month of being largely disengaged from their classes.
It took until some time in May before teachers started holding online classes live with students. There was no requirement for students to attend, so teachers needed to try to provide incentives to get students to attend their online classes. It was such a time of disengagement, confusion, and fear about what would happen next. I think this fear and trauma is still with us and many of our students now, even as we return to the new school year.
We are still far from what “normal” school would look like and we may not be able to return to that during this school year. This is absolutely the most difficult start to a school year that I have experienced since I was a brand-new teacher. Even then, at least everyone ELSE knew what they were doing! Now, we are all in new territory, groping our way blindly along the path, holding on to each other for support. It’s a very poignant time, I suppose, in the way we are all doing WHATEVER we need to do to make this experiment work, supporting each other in any way we can.
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