Monday: In my continuing series of CoronaWorld oral histories, I interview a high-school English teacher at a small Washington, D.C., public charter school. I edited our 60-minute conversation for clarity.
Me: Describe your job before CoronaWorld.
Teacher: I’ve been teaching for 17 years. This is my 10th year at this school, which is five times longer than I’ve stayed at any other school. Our school has been quite successful. We have a wide range of students, both in terms of racial and ethnic demographics and in terms of student abilities: we have full slate of [Advanced Placement] classes for upper-school students, and we have a lot of students struggling to write and do school basics. We’re a charter: admission is by lottery from across the District of Columbia. The way we try to ensure geographic and economic diversity is to do extra recruiting in areas where we might not get as many applications. But otherwise the system operates by blind lottery.
My teaching load has varied. This year I have two sections of a sophomore honors English class, with 19 and 15 students, and two sections of an A.P. class on rhetoric for sophomores, juniors, and seniors, with 16 and 15 students.
Me: Describe the transition you faced when CoronaWorld descended.
Teacher: Something that D.C. schools did very well: two weeks before the switch to distance learning, they surveyed all families to determine their resources and needs. They got information and did a good job of figuring out the equity piece quickly. Most schools in D.C. made sure every family has a device; they gave away laptops or Chromebooks loaded with software; no collateral, you need it, here you go, use it for the duration.
Every charter school in D.C. is its own [Local Education Agency — in essence, its own school district]. Each makes individual decisions, but most of the time we track D.C. public schools, because people’s lives would be disturbed if weren’t following the same schedule. On Monday, March 16, we canceled school to have a professional development day to roll out how things would work; our administration worked non-stop from 4:30 p.m. Friday [March 13] to 10 a.m. Monday to figure things out. They decided on something wise: a relatively bare-bones structure for classes and expectations for students and teachers. The goal was for students to do meaningful work and to keep things manageable for everyone.
For the first three or four weeks we did no synchronous teaching at all. All lessons were designed to be doable by students at any time, wherever they happened to be. It was a decision driven by concerns about equity, for those families with limited amounts of time or devices.
For my A.P. students, typically we’d have an equivalent of 320 minutes of school every week: five 45-minute class periods, plus homework. Now we’re meeting for 150 minutes: 30 minutes for everyone on Monday, and then two 60-minute classes, one section on Tuesday/Thursday, the other on Wednesday/Friday. So we’ve cut down to about half time. That’s been successful.
Me: Why?
Teacher: We don’t try to do too much. Our focus has been on keeping work meaningful and manageable. Our students have recorded that they have no trouble meeting homework deadlines — not often, anyway. Students have to submit something for assessment, even if it’s just a completion check, by a 9 p.m. deadline every night. We assign no homework over the weekends. Assignments are expected to be standalone — we have no assignments where the teacher gives it on Monday and it’s due on Friday. Even if it’s a longer project, we break it into steps. It’s much more regimented. We make the expectations as clear as possible, and make each piece as concrete as possible.
For example, my A.P. students are working on an essay. On Monday they were assigned to brainstorm; on Tuesday, to respond to a writing prompt; on Thursday, to turn in a rough draft; the next Monday, to have a completed first draft; on Tuesday, to have read and commented on a peer’s essay; on Thursday, to respond to their peer’s questions and comments. Normally we’d do versions in class, more quickly and fluidly. Now we’re regimentally broken the process down, with checks along the way. And we’re working twice as long on an assignment that would have taken a week. In Honors English, we’re taking a month to read the last few books of The Odyssey, which would take a week-and-a-half normally.
Proceeding deliberately means much less time pressure on the kids. We want them waking up at a reasonable hour, finishing work at a reasonable hour, and going to bed with their slates clean, nothing hanging over their heads. The goal is to create a sense of routine, to give them some control. They’re teenagers: they want more control over their lives, and a lot of control has been wrested away from them.
And my hunch is that most students — I know there are exceptions — feel like they have mastery over their work. Even if they don’t understand everything they’re doing in, say, a chemistry class, they’re keeping up with their work and going to bed at night with everything done. That’s important in quarantine, because a lot are facing existential dread, in the form of family members who’ve died of Covid-19. Or students who are working part-time or full-time jobs because their parents have been laid off or furloughed, so the family is dependent on their income.
Me: Did faculty members push back against a system that only covers half of normal work?
Teacher: There was not a lot of pushback. Our administrators are the best I’ve ever worked with, and people trust them a great deal. If my principal said, It’s important to walk off this bridge — well, she’s telling me to do it, it must be pretty important. They were really direct, much more explicit than usual about exactly what they wanted us to do. Teacher autonomy is really important here; it’s the main reason I’ve stayed for as long as I have. Granting that freedom has allowed the administration to bank a great deal of symbolic capital.
And it’s not like teachers haven’t wanted direction. We’ve experienced a great deal of turmoil. Our school differentiates itself on small class sizes and close relations with students. How do we do our thing when our physical presence goes away? It’s been a really difficult transition.
I thought a lot of my class work, especially the written forms of discussion, would lend itself to distance education. I was a college student when the world wide web became our primary means of communication and information; I remember chat rooms and message boards, which aren’t so different from classroom discussions. I thought I could transition pretty easily. But if every task needs to be discrete and done by a particular time — you can’t run a discussion board that way. If everyone has the freedom to post by 9 p.m., then a lot will be posting around 8:30, and no one will have time to respond. So I had to adjust.
Me: What about synchronous lessons?
Teacher: We’re not holding many. For my classes we’re offering 45-minute sessions every other Monday, and they’re not required. We’re using the live session exclusively as an opportunity for discussion; when they can’t attend I ask them to respond to discussion questions in writing.
As an English teacher, the thing I miss the most is talking about literature with my students. That’s what they’re missing most as learners. We need an opportunity to converse with each other. It’s great to see my students, but it’s hard to make the sessions productive. People are often late by a couple of minutes, so 45 minutes quickly becomes 40. Then I have to do housekeeping tasks: now we’re down to 30. It’s not enough. And it takes time away from both my parenting and the other things I need to do as educator: planning, grading, recording.
Me: How are you handling grading?
Teacher: Most work I’m grading for completion only. I can’t grade so many individual assignments each day; I don’t have time. So most students are getting A’s, A-minuses. A handful are not turning things in and getting bad grades.
It’s hard to figure out what’s going on with each student. A couple were not doing well in school to begin with. It looks like a couple are struggling with ennui or depression. I’m trying to stay in touch and support them. It’s hard to figure out: is this person simply choosing not to apply themselves, or are they spiraling into depression?
Our school has kept our weekly homeroom lunches, where we eat together on Fridays. Every homeroom is having Friday zoom meetings. Kids can come in, hang out, check in with advisors, play trivia games. And then all families receive a phone call per week, either from me or another staff member. So I’ve been calling homes, seeing most of my advisees. But we don’t have in-person access to people. Our counselors can still refer students to a psychiatrist or psychologist outside of school, but it’s harder to make that happen if the student is difficult to reach or insists they don’t want to.
Me: Is your authority as a teacher altered in an online classroom?
Teacher: I have a couple of different answers to that. One: It’s outside the realm of things I can control, so I don’t think about it. Two: My school has invested heavily in close relationships between students and teachers. Students recognize teachers are here because we care about them. Even struggling students will acknowledge that teachers are asking them to do things because we want what’s good for them.
And then our expectations have been dialed back so far, everyone should be able to do a pretty good job. We’re not going to see much differentiation between the straight A and the B+ student. That’s a byproduct of trying to keep everything manageable, to keep kids emotionally and mentally and physically healthy in this time.
Me: How has your daily work load changed?
Teacher: I’m in a much more fortunate situation than a lot of teachers and families, but that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. It’s been quite hard, in fact. Each assignment requires enormous work. I’ve been providing written descriptions of what the students should do; preparing all the materials and handouts they need; and taping brief video explanations so they can see my face and hear my voice, especially for kids who struggle to process information by reading. We’re using one grading software to get assignments to students. We’re using Google Forms for their exit tickets — a short set of reflective questions for each assignment. Everything needs to be stored in our online grading system, as well as a Google Dox depository for the school. So we’re using four different forms of software and media we weren’t using before. I’m starting to get the hang of it, but it takes a long time.
And then it’s really, really hard to do a job, to be a parent, and to supervise my children’s distance learning at the same time. One of my colleagues said, “It’s clear to me the people who have children and those who don’t.” This week I was putting up lessons for the next day between 9:30 at night and 2 in the morning. That’s the only time I have. For me, teaching has always been the thing the rest of my life was built around. Now, I’m fitting in teaching around the other parts of my life.
Me: What has online learning been like for your children?
Teacher: My older daughter is 9, and she’s mostly able to work unsupervised. But my younger one is 5, and she’s not. Their mother is an educator as well, so we’re tagging in and out. They need a lot of supervision and interaction. They started with asynchronous lessons, and those worked pretty well. But the synchronous lessons have been harder. Both grasp skills pretty quickly, and both are feeling unchallenged and unstimulated. Their teachers are doing their best to provide them additional challenges and projects, including during the lessons when they’d otherwise just be sitting there.
I think the educational community will find, when we look back, that the live video classroom is surprisingly limited compared to the actual classroom, especially for younger grades. It’s harder to pay attention. It’s harder for teachers to provide resources based on students’ abilities. How do you differentiate between students of different skill levels? In video teaching the answer is: Not well. Then you can’t count on children in lower grades to do anything outside of class meetings. If I ask my students to read Books 23 and 24 of The Odyssey to be ready for tomorrow, I can show up knowing they’ll be ready. You can’t do that with elementary-grade kids. The curricula, the grading systems: they’re not equipped to make this shift to digital.
For some of my daughters’ classmates, they may have only one device, or the parents are working, and if a grandparent or a caregiver isn’t aware of the online resources or can’t make them work, they can’t use them. My daughters’ teachers are pretty concerned about skill loss. Before she started getting extra projects my older daughter was frustrated because the teacher was getting kids acclimated to working online, then reinforcing things already taught during the year. Standardized tests have been suspended in D.C., but they’ll happen next year, and teachers are really concerned about their students’ grade-level readiness. I know my older daughter’s skill development is not being pushed forward.
Me: What if you have to continue online teaching in the fall?
Teacher: I don’t know. The way I’ve adjusted to this as teacher is the same way I’ve adjusted my habits as a long-distance canoe racer: I take each hurdle one at a time. When we left in mid-March, it was clear to me this wasn’t going to be a two- or a six-week thing. The city administrators have given preliminary deadlines, but I recognize they’re placeholders for reconsidering the question of whether to reopen. In my training, I had races canceled in May and June. That’s a bummer, but I have a race in September, and I’ll build toward that. If that goes, there’s one in October that’s an annual highlight for me. If that goes, that will be disappointing. But the healthiest way for me to react is to keep shifting the goalposts. If we get to summer and they tell us we have to do distance learning in the fall, I’ll shift the goalposts then. There’s no emotional, physical, or psychological profit in thinking about it before then.
(New York state numbers on Monday: 318,953 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.8 percent; 226 dead, to a total of 19,415 up 1.2 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 877, to a total of 62,953, up 1.4 percent.)
I'm establishing an oral history of the pandemic; previous interviews include with a public college professor, a public middle school student, a private college dean, a public high school teacher, and a public bilingual third-grade teacher.
No comments:
Post a Comment