Sunday: I talk to a friend, a teacher at one of New York City’s nine specialized public high schools designed to support academically or artistically excellent students, about how CoronaWorld has disrupted her semester. I edited our 45-minute talk for clarity.
Me: Tell me about your job before CoronaWorld.
Teacher: I’m an English teacher; I’ve been teaching for close to 20 years, much of that focused on writing. This semester I’m teaching two sections of freshman composition; one section of our core senior writing class; and two sections of a class for juniors and seniors about writing to create change in the world. Those students can write in any genre or a hybrid genre in order to make change about issues they care about; we have units on graphic books, memoirs, op/eds, letters to political representatives, playwriting — it’s a fun class. In any given semester I teach 150 to 170 kids. This semester my load is low: in my five sections I have 142.
Me: Describe what happened when you had to transition to CoronaWorld.
Teacher: At first it was unclear that we would be shutting down at all. There was no planning. On Monday [March 9] everything was normal. By Wednesday, we were asking: Is New York City shutting its school system? By Thursday a lot of us teachers felt we needed to shut down. We started giving out books to students, but we didn’t know what we were planning for. On Friday I kept my own kids home, and a lot of parents did the same. I spent part of that day with a group of teachers trying to convince the mayor to shut the schools.
The mayor officially closed the schools on Sunday [March 15]. Teachers were then supposed to come in for three days to get training in remote instruction, which in my opinion caused people’s deaths. Across the system, teachers took subways for three days to come to school when they didn’t need to. I stayed home. I have tenure, and I had sick days in the bank; I was docked three sick days, even though I was working 12 hours a day. But teachers who weren’t tenured or had no sick days to lose, they went in.
There was no sense of what we should be doing. We were promised instruction on remote learning, but that was non-existent. Most of the instruction consisted of “Figure it out.” We had little help or advice. I know the [Department of Education] was overwhelmed, but no one had plans in place. The city educates 1.1 million students, and a lot don’t have technology at home. The DOE was flying blind, which I understand. But it was total discombobulation.
Our school has 3,200 kids and close to 200 faculty. That first week schools were closed, we had a couple of faculty email lists going constantly, one for the full faculty and one for 25 English teachers. We were on video chat, text messages. We had a lot of extremely committed, smart teachers helping each other figure out how to make this work.
That first week we wanted to do something to let kids know we were still here, though we weren’t officially open. We sent messages to the students, and we started doing English Department “minutes.” Every day in class we have a student deliver minutes from the previous day and give a gift to the class, in the form of a poem or a quote or a talent. So the English Department moved minutes online, and kids responded to that and each other. I had already set up Google Classroom for my classes, so even though it wasn’t official we started to figure out how to make community in these online spaces.
Then it was like, okay, now figure out how to teach online. We were getting to know Google Classroom, and Zoom was working pretty well. Then on a Friday at 10 p.m. [April 3], the DOE canceled spring break and the use of Zoom. They told us we all had to use Microsoft Teams. They closed Zoom because of security concerns. Each Zoom class had a number assigned to it, and hackers could generate algorithms, find the number, and pop in. If the hosts knew how, they could secure it, but the DOE didn’t trust that all teachers would be able to do that, and they worried about lawsuits.
In my experience, my department chair has been amazing, my faculty colleagues amazing, and the central DOE? Not particularly helpful. With online platforms, the teachers don’t get guidance; we figure stuff out on their own; and then the DOE figures out what we’re doing and says, No, don’t do that.
Me: What has teaching been like? How have you been able to engage your students?
Teacher: Let me first say: Teaching in a public school is a window into the ways that this pandemic has heightened extreme inequality among people who live in New York City.
At my school, 40 percent of students live below the poverty level. That means we can’t do live, synchronous learning, because we can’t ensure that everyone has access to the technology. [Almost one in three New York City households, 2.2 million people, lack broadband internet.]
Eighty-five percent of our students are immigrants or first-generation Americans. A lot of the parents lost jobs or are working in low-wage industries, so they’re living with a lot of financial instability, stress, and anxiety. They’re sharing computers with parents and siblings; they can’t get online when you want them to. Then we have students who are sick with Covid-19, whose family members are sick, whose family members have died — uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents. Their lives are chaotic.
So any synchronous lesson means only a subset will show up. My classroom cap is 34 students; I have one class of 30; and my freshman classes have 28. When I try live online “teaching” (put quotes around the word teaching), I get an average of 12 to 15 kids. So I record it and post in on Google Classroom for others to watch later.
One important thing Zoom had was backgrounds, which kids could set up to allow privacy. When kids use a hangout without a background, some who show up won’t turn their cameras on, in part because they’re living in close quarters with family members and they don’t want to show everyone in class where they live. We usually want their mics muted, but some won’t turn mics on at all because they live in crowded, noisy apartments.
A huge portion of time that used to be for teaching — for being in the classroom with live human beings, working through a piece of literature, focusing on a writing skill, communicating with each other about a piece of work — is now piecemeal and individual and asynchronous. And it has to be that way. Lessons have to be something that kids can access at any time or place.
Photo by Pexel
Much of what I do now is logging engagement: Did I make contact today with each student? Did they comment, turn something in, show themselves online in some way? If you didn’t check in, I’ll go to the internal school system and look up your biographical info, see if any counselors or other teachers have reached out to you, try to figure out how to connect. It’s a huge amount of time. I’m up until midnight most nights, and so little of it is about teaching.
My metaphor: I’m throwing 142 lines every day — throw out the lines, tug back, tug back, tug back. The kids who aren’t responding: Are they sick? Did they have someone die? Are they in deep depression? Or are they just feeling lazy and not checking email this week? The common ground we all had in the classroom is pulled from beneath our feet.
Me: What kind of feedback are you getting from students about online learning?
Teacher: A lot of freshmen say they’re having more difficulty understanding material, science and math especially. Some have said how much harder it is to comprehend lessons communicated on screen, rather than in interactions with teachers and other students.
In my classes, we’ve covered a little bit of literature, but primarily I’m focusing on writing projects. It’s possible to have reasonable communication about writing online. They’re workshopping pieces in Google Docs; they’re meeting synchronously in small groups; and I can give feedback on Docs as well. But a few times, especially with my ninth graders, I had to make individual phone calls, because I was confident they weren’t understanding what I was writing.
Me: Does this affect some students more than others? I’m thinking of students with different learning styles — visual, auditory, kinesthetic.
Teacher: It probably does. But most of what I’m seeing concerns situations at home. Are they taking care of siblings, then doing school work in the middle of the night? A senior told me early on that her parents own a grocery store, and she had to fill in for workers calling in sick. Then her mom didn’t want her in the store, but she’s dealing every day with suppliers on phone — she has to translate for her mother, who’s Chinese. A lot of the kids have to translate for their parents. So I’ve made alternative assignments for kids who just can’t do schoolwork right now.
Me: What about grading?
Teacher: We have to provide feedback, but the DOE has not officially said what will happen with the grading system. Unofficially, we understand that K-8 will be Pass/Fail. But no one’s allowed to fail, so it will be Pass/Incomplete. In high school we’ll need to assign grades, but no one will fail, so we’ll also be using Incompletes. As with so many aspects, the DOE will be privileging kids with a stable home life and enough money to succeed.
Grading is the last thing I’ve been prioritizing. Over the week that became a semi-spring break, our guidance counselors took on the work of engaging students, and it gave us part of a week to catch up and not assign new work. And I turned around nine sets of class work that I hadn’t had any time to look at, including things I’d assigned before [CoronaWorld].
The other thing to remember: teachers have families, too. I have three children in K-8. Two are old enough to handle work on their own. But my youngest is 7, and he needs me or my husband to sit with him to do his work.
Me: What’s better about online learning?
Teacher: Nothing. Nothing is better. Not at all. It’s terrible. The synergy that happens in a classroom — it’s not replicable online. Kids in class work together, discover things together, bounce ideas off each other; even if someone responds to an online comment, it feels like a completely different thing. And the social interactions that all of us are missing, students and adults, can’t be replicated this way.
Our school has a monthly open mic event in the auditorium; students read work, sing, play music. On Friday the students held a Zoom open mic, and they invited some of the English teachers. The teachers all found it incredibly emotional. Seeing these kids, including a lot of seniors who won’t get to celebrate their graduation — seeing them sing to each other, write comments in the chat windows supporting each other — it was so moving. [Pause] Heartbreaking, actually. [Pause] They’re aware of so much that’s being lost.
The students at our school come from all five boroughs; they speak something like 60 languages. Public school in New York City can be a great equalizer, allowing kids to thrive and achieve at levels they couldn’t on their own. You can’t replicate that without meeting in person. We have kids who stay in the building for after-school activities until they’re kicked out. They run their own theatre program, build their own sets. There’s a board game club. All of the sports. All of the social ways they connect. It’s really hard to see that taken away.
And a lot of kids are having issues at home. We have LGBTQ kids living with families that don’t understand or accept their identities; now that’s where they are all the time. For some of our wonderful, nerdy, nutty kids — they don’t get to be themselves at home. High school is a place where that can happen, and at my school it happens a lot.
Me: Is your authority as a teacher altered in an online classroom?
Teacher: I don’t think in those terms. My goal is to set up classroom systems as a scaffolding that will allow kids to figure things out with each other as much as possible, without me ping-ponging with them. It makes my voice less necessary. I’m privileged to teach kids for whom classroom management is not an issue. But everything is harder to do online, including that.
On the technology side, it’s been complicated to figure out how to post things on Google Classroom that students can find and use. The details are boring. It took me days to figure out why students weren’t always seeing each other’s responses. I had to learn to cross-post things so everyone can see it. So much of my brain is taken up with shit like that instead of teaching, content.
Me: What will be your reaction if you have to do this in the fall?
Teacher: Oh, Jesus. [Pause] Starting classes online seems extraordinarily challenging, even more than doing it mid-semester. I’d already established relationships with all of my students. I make a big effort in the first two weeks to learn their names; in the first marking period I meet individually with everyone to go through their composition books, so they know that I know them.
With brand new ninth graders? My god, the whole first month of ninth grade is: Here’s how you act and how you learn and how structures work in high school. I have no idea how any of that would work online.
(New York state numbers on Sunday: 288,045 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 2.1 percent; 367 dead, to a total of 16,966, up 2.2 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,168, to a total of 49,113, up 2.4 percent.)
I'm establishing an oral history of the pandemic; previous interviews include with a public college professor, a public middle school student, and a private college dean.
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