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What it’s like to be a teacher in 2020 America amid the coronavirus pandemic

‘There’s this in-person connection we have that looks very different over Zoom,’ says special needs teacher 

Tuesday 20 October 2020 14:21 BST
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A primary school teacher teaches students over Zoom at Freedom Preparatory Academy in Provo, Utah
A primary school teacher teaches students over Zoom at Freedom Preparatory Academy in Provo, Utah

More than 150 years ago, Massachusetts lawmakers came up with a radical idea: all young people should be educated. The commonwealth passed the country’s first law requiring that children go to school, then was left wondering where to find the teachers it needed to educate all those children.

A school committee in Littleton, Massachusetts, came up with a simple solution. “God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind,” the committee wrote in 1849. Why pay men $20 (£15.42) a month when “a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price”.

Not only did women appear uniquely fitted to the work of teaching, they also didn’t have competing professional opportunities that would drive wages up — or so the logic went. “The argument was: ‘Look, women will learn to be better mothers by practicing on other people’s children,’” said Richard Ingersoll, a sociologist at University of Pennsylvania. “Proponents made the case it was a win-win.”

As other states followed Massachusetts’s lead, and public schools opened across the country, they filled with female teachers. By the late 1880s, women made up 63 per cent of the country’s teachers. The profession has remained female dominated ever since.

In 2017, women comprised more than three-quarters of public school teachers, in a profession that remains stubbornly underpaid and undervalued.

Now the coronavirus has placed those same underpaid teachers at the heart of a national crisis as the US looks to teachers not only for children’s education and wellbeing but also as essential childcare as parents try to get back to work.

“Our public education system is a massive hidden child care subsidy,” said Jon Shelton, a historian of the teaching workforce at the University of Wisconsin.

Here are three stories from teachers across the US about the complex roles they have played in their students’ lives since the virus first kicked up and how they’re managing school now.

The community worker

Jardy Santana teaches English at Mott Haven Academy Charter School, a school predominantly serving families involved in the child welfare system in the Bronx, which is run in partnership with the New York Foundling. She has been teaching for 12 years, including 10 at Mott Haven, and this year has been her hardest.

For her, the onset of remote learning last spring brought a weighty realisation: each student has very different needs in the virtual classroom. She began checking in individually with her fourth grade pupils. Some needed help accessing food. Some needed a shoulder to cry on (virtually) when their family members were sick. Some needed individualised help with their reading.

Ms Santana joined the school’s food programme, distributing meals to families so she could see her pupils and offer them air hugs at a distance. She kept an eye out for those who missed class, and texted them to say they could rely on her for emotional support.

“I said: ‘If you’re feeling sick, if a family member is sick, I’m here. You don’t just have to call me to talk about academics, you can share how you’re feeling.’”

One of Ms Santana’s students didn’t have internet access at home and relied on New York’s public wifi booths. It was clear the student was worried about her classroom performance suffering, Ms Santana explained, so they worked out an arrangement: when getting internet was tough, the student could call Ms Santana and dictate writing exercises to her over the phone. These phone calls tightened their bond emotionally too. They discovered they had the same birthday, so they celebrated remotely.

Many teachers are having to relearn the best ways of teaching their students in the age of virtual learning due to Covid-19

Ms Santana was intent on countering the gloom around them — especially the incessant noise of sirens — by bringing levity into the virtual classroom. One afternoon they had a dance party instead of a lesson. “It was extremely hard on the kids to not see each other, not have their friends, not have their teachers around,” she said.

Ms Santana was relieved to see her students’ moods lighten on spirit days. She celebrated Crazy Hair Day with them on Zoom by designing a makeshift headband, and Crazy Accessories Day by digging out an old pair of glasses from her dresser. One morning, they were prompted to send a photo of something in their home that was providing them with emotional support. Ms Santana sent a picture with her Kitchen-Aid, because baking Dominican cakes with her children has brought her joy on particularly high stress days.

Over the summer, Mott Haven Academy wrestled with whether to stay virtual or go to a hybrid model in the fall, like so many New York City schools. But its surrounding neighbourhood in the Bronx was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic: 2,804 Covid-19 cases and 253 deaths per 100,000 people. The school decided to remain virtual until the neighbourhood’s daily infection rate went below the 3 per cent threshold identified by the city as critical for school reopening.

As the new semester begins, she is learning to set boundaries and focus on her own family as well. “Sometimes I have to say, you did your job as a teacher, now you’ve got your mum hat on,” she said. “This is Ms Santana time, this is Jardy time.”

The union activist

Sarah Pamperin is a bilingual teacher in Green Bay, Wisconsin, working with Spanish-speaking sixth grade students at a Green Bay area public school. For her, the early weeks of the pandemic were a haze of nonstop work, all of which felt insufficient to meet her students’ needs. She worked with student services to deliver food, books and jump ropes to their porches. She texted and called them to see how their families were doing.

Her school is near a meatpacking plant where many of the parents of her students work. In April, it was the site of a major Covid-19 outbreak, resulting in numerous parents being hospitalised. One former student had a parent who died.

Hoping to help her students process the fast-moving news, she assigned them an essay to write on the pandemic, but her students found it too draining to discuss. The personal stress they were under made it hard for them to focus on academic progress at all.

“There was a lot of emotional turmoil and we couldn’t do a whole lot of curricular teaching,” she said. “Those were some of the darkest weeks of my life.” Instead of spending her time focused on lesson plans, she found herself consumed by her students’ emotional well-being — contacting those who had to temporarily stay with other relatives, texting with children whose parents were hospitalised.

Ms Pamperin is an active union member but she’s less focused on teachers’ rights and more focused on using her union position to promote the needs of bilingual and non-English speaking parents in her district, pushing for widespread use of a phone app that allows teachers to communicate with families in their native language. She has fought to improve her school’s teachings on racial injustice.

This summer, when her district decided that schools would continue remote rather than in-person learning in the fall, she “obsessively” tracked which students didn’t have internet access. Through her union, she also asked the district to create learning pods — small clusters of students who could study together daily — but the suggestion was rejected. Some feared this would make the district liable for coronavirus outbreaks.

She has also scrambled to balance caring for her students with tending to her own sons (ages 2 and 4), one of whom has autism.

Ms Pamperin feels that her personal struggles allow her to connect more deeply with students. She knows what it is like to care for a developmentally disabled child - she also has personal experience living with economic challenges like more than half of her students.

“It’s helped me to take more of an activist stance for families, instead of just saying: ‘Yeah, that’s a real bummer,’” she said. “I can empathise with what families are going through.”

Champion for the disabled

When Caitlin Hernandez was in graduate school, she was asked the same question over and over again: can someone who is blind really be a teacher? The doubt she heard made her all the more certain she did want to go into teaching, so that her students — many of whom have autism, dyslexia, ADHD and physical disabilities — would have a role model who really knew what they were experiencing. She wanted them to learn from her success, not to question their own aspirations.

Ms Hernandez typically starts out every school year introducing herself as someone who is totally blind and has been her whole life, then reads a book called My Three Best Friends and Me, Zulay, which has a blind protagonist. 

A lower school substitute teacher works from home, alongside fellow staff, to figure out the best ways of teaching digitally

Then came Covid and Ms Hernandez’s blindness made the adjustment to virtual learning all the more challenging. She teaches special education to second, third and fourth grade students, as well as kindergardeners, at Rooftop School, an alternative public school in San Francisco. She is accustomed to using hands-on tactics such as counting out objects with her students in math class. These tactile learning techniques are no longer possible on Zoom.

Before the pandemic, she started her days taking an access-a-ride service to school, arriving just before class started at 7.50am. Now she “rolls out of bed” and starts with an 8.30am Zoom session, offering one-on-one reading assistance to one of her students.

In the pre-Covid classroom, Ms Hernandez had an assistant who kept an eye on the students and ensured they were paying attention. Now that classes are remote, that assistant functions as a "back seat Zoom driver", helping to monitor the chatbox and unmute students while Ms Hernandez reads her lesson plan. Ms Hernandez uses the Zoom app on her phone, which is linked to a Braille display. In the afternoon, she offers 30-minute larger classes, and smaller group reading exercises for just two or three students.

She misses being in person with her students, which helped establish trust. “There’s this in-person connection we have of being like: ‘I’m also disabled, so I get that it’s hard but we’re going to do this together,’” Ms Hernandez said. “I tell them: ‘I got you, I’ve been there.’ And that looks very different over Zoom.”

It is not just Ms Hernandez who is experiencing the difficulties of remote learning. She has heard from her disabled students that they are struggling emotionally. They depended on their in-person classes both for structure and community.

“The nature of the pandemic is that everything is so unpredictable, and that’s hard for autistic people because structure is so helpful,” she said. “I hear people say: ‘This must be great for kids with autism because the classroom is overwhelming.’ It’s really not. They’re missing out on being with folks who engage them.”

Most troubling to Ms Hernandez is the widening gap between her students who get support from their families at home, and those who have to push themselves through virtual learning and even provide child care to their younger siblings, because their parents are struggling, too. “It’s not equitable,” she said. “Some students have support at home and others just don’t.”

Ms Hernandez has seen her students struggle to focus during virtual classes. Sometimes they wander away from their computers, or forget to mute themselves while calling for a snack. She knows that privately many of them are suffering, especially those with parents who lost jobs. Ms Hernandez has provided comfort and structure by arranging activities they can do together virtually.

“I asked the kids what books they had at home that they really enjoyed,” she said. “Then I would go download it so we could read together.”

New York Times

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