PANDEMIC TEACHING

by Ruth A. Sheets

I am a teacher and have been for more than a quarter of a century.  The 2020-2021 school year has been the most difficult for me since I started teaching.  Of course, it is primarily due to the pandemic. 

We teachers have been meeting with our students by zoom for nearly a year.  That in itself is not the problem, it is that we and our supervisors are trying to pretend that this year is no different from all other years.  It is.  Nothing like this pandemic has happened to us in a bit over a century.  We were not prepared for it either as individuals or as school communities, and that is definitely evident. 

We should be using the issues of the pandemic and the challenges as teachable moments and base our reading, math, science, and social studies instruction on that.  We should take this opportunity to focus on problem-solving what the country should look like when the pandemic has been tamed.  There will be a new normal.  Having students read and respond to materials relevant to that potential new normal would help them feel as though they have a part in creating what is to come.  

We should have been using the technology available to us to help students connect with others in very positive ways and let them help each other explore the challenges of COVID-19, systemic racism, global warming, poverty, and the other issues that have been brought into full relief since the start of the pandemic.  The internet is working, so students can explore and report back.  Even young children can participate – C is for COVID, V is for virus.  I bet there is a whole alphabet for the words of this special time.  

In addition, we need to stop calling this a lost year and complaining that students have gained nothing since March 2020.  By trying to pretend teaching and learning are just the same but online is doing a great disservice to our teachers and students as well as our families.  Our children are not failures.  They are amazing young people who are learning to face some adversity and figuring out how to deal with it.  That is astonishing and we should be acknowledging them for it rather than beating them down with ridiculous expectations of learning the usual curriculum at the same pace as pre-pandemic times.  That makes no sense and can be a factor in sending our precious kids into depression and other emotional pain.  I have even heard educators state that we should not refer to the pandemic at all.  Talk about burying one’s head in the sand!

With the stress of learning to survive and eventually, perhaps to thrive in this weird world of Zoom, hybrid, whatever, educators are still expected to administer the weeks-long batteries of standardized tests, if not this spring, than definitely in the fall.  For what purpose will this be done, so the corporations that make the tests won’t lose money, so we can prove our kids didn’t master all the stuff in the curriculum while also trying to manage life in COVID Land?

This should be a time of experimentation.  We should be looking at ways to catch our students’ attention, deeply involve them in what is happening and help them develop the social-emotional intelligence that will give them the ability to function as active informed citizens.  Perhaps the books and online resources we go to should show young people (or animal characters) dealing with tough situations and making it through.  They could be encouraged to write about their experiences of this year.  I suspect their descriptions will look quite different from those of adults during this time.

Colleagues are giving out “F’s” like candy to accentuate that our kids really are failures if they don’t come to Zoom every day and don’t hand in activities they know don’t relate in any way to and ignore what they are experiencing.  This is just one more way our society demonstrates its lack of true care for and appreciation of our precious children. 

One thing I know for certain, we can do better.