Teaching Through a Pandemic
Welcome to the new normal; a virtual checkerboard of pixelated faces, black boxes and the dreaded “Reconnecting…” Schrodinger’s student - have they really lost connection, or just interest?
Lecture theaters sit empty, classrooms abandoned and cafeterias silent, in a Chernobyl-esque tableau of life before corona. Grade two’s sunflowers have died for lack of watering. February’s science projects sit neglected in the lab; unfinished, ungraded. On the desk is a new project: a small green jungle growing in the coffee mug that was never taken back to the staff room.
As schools, colleges and universities around the world shut down campuses, and moved all teaching online for the foreseeable future, some of us panicked, some of us bluffed, and all of us improvised.
As a science professor, I began tracking the spread of the virus early on, and my courses were up and running online within a matter of days, when the time came. But to say that teaching what is usually a three hour lab class on a laptop from my dining room is a challenge, would be an understatement.
Instead of our human anatomy model at school, my kids are looking at a Google image of the vagus nerve. I’ve spent a lot of time on YouTube finding videos to demonstrate experiments and processes I can no longer show them in person. I’ve also become a telemarketer, having to maintain both enthusiasm and energy while I watch kids get up and leave their seats or turn their cameras off.
Some of my students have outright refused to ever join online classes with either their video or audio turned on. I was teaching to a void, and quickly became disenchanted. I quickly became angry, too - and that didn’t help matters at all.
My husband worked on I Am Legend in 2007. Let me tell you, at many points in lessons over the last few months, I have felt like Will Smith talking to his mannequin friends in the DVD store.
So I was thoroughly surprised, and delighted, when I started to see better exam results than before the pandemic. That was, until I realized that the kids had found a way around Respondus and were simply googling the answers.
As the weeks rolled on, the excusals flooded in. I had a student email me right before the finals, to say she couldn’t sit the exam because her entire family was in the emergency room. I had another girl whose mom was a nurse, and had come down with COVID. One of my other student’s aunts emailed me her work, because the student and both of her parents were in hospital. The student emailed me later, apologizing.
My anger has promptly turned to sorrow. Despair tries to creep through every open window. I have an immunocompromised daughter at home.
But I have to remind myself, for her and for my students, that I am the teacher, and the parent here: there is no good to come from letting them know I am scared.
That instinct we have as adults and educators to first and foremost provide a safe, stable and consistent environment for our most vulnerable kids - is what I am living on right now.
I soon realized that the reason many students don’t turn on their video or audio is because they are embarrassed by their homes, or they have a very loud home with younger children in it. Some drop outs I had early on simply did not have computers at home at all, or they or their parents were sick.
Never have students been so accessible and inaccessible. Never have all of our kids been so vulnerable.
Many schools are working on an A/A- grade scale. I am grading very gently. I think the Canadian federal government’s advice can be applied to teaching, too:
“We are not teaching from home, we are at home, surviving a pandemic, trying to teach. ”
School is the consistency that many students will be relying on right now for structure in an otherwise unstructured world. The role of educators in a pandemic is not just to teach, or even to help students pass the time or their exams. Teachers are some of the only remaining guardians of normality in most kids’ lives at the moment.
So it’s okay if you’re preaching to blank, silent squares or mannequins who haven’t said hello to you today. Say hello to them, and carry on. You’re doing great.