When COVID-19 emptied schools, a teacher learned new lessons

I’ve been asked, “How’s school going?” more times since COVID-19 blew up our lives than in the previous 37 years I’ve been a Palm Beach County high-school teacher. For anyone wanting a behind-the-scenes answer, this is mine:

When schools closed March 13, 2020 “until at least March 30,” fortunately, I had the foresight to lug home a dozen big notebooks filled with worksheets and tests I had created over the years.

On March 19, 2020, the school board announced, “Virtual instruction will launch on Tuesday, March 31. Teachers will prepare on Monday, March 30, after spring break.”

I don’t remember even hearing of Google Classroom before March 2020, but from March 31 until May 29, 2020, I was required to post and grade assignments in this cyber classroom.

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Fortunately, I wasn’t required to use Google Meet (another term that quickly became a part of my vernacular) to actually teach. I had never even participated in a video conference, let alone conducted one.

Some teachers did use Google Meet. I wish I could say I was one of them; but you know what they say about teaching old dogs new tricks. Just being told that I had to create a Google Classroom, take attendance via an extension (what?), and grade papers without actually writing on them, made me want to sit on my couch and binge-watch a few seasons of some new Netflix series while eating chocolate.

I had no idea how to do anything I was being asked to do, but I didn’t want to bother anyone or appear stupid. And, frankly, I was too proud to ask for help. As a veteran teacher, shouldn’t the new teachers be asking me for help?

If my calculations are right, I’ve worked under eight governors, 10 superintendents, and eight principals — who have all had different ideas about what’s best for our students. So, yes, I’ve learned to be flexible.

But what I really wanted was for someone to sit next to me, hold my hand, and show me what to do. However, because of the pandemic, that wasn’t possible.

Learning to teach in a virtual environment

When Jose Garcia, a former student, offered to “remotely access” my laptop and show me what to do, I was nervous, but he assured me that I would be able to see everything he was doing, and I could cut off his access at any time, so I accepted. He ended up being a huge help, as did my son, administrators, and co-workers.

When the 2019-20 school year ended, we were told that for the 2020-21 school year, we would be required to conduct live lessons and record them. That summer, we were bombarded with emails telling us that we needed to do this, that, and the other thing.

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I hated that we would have to record our lessons. I envisioned students posting embarrassing videos of their teachers and those videos going viral. I feared we would have to form support groups for teachers being ridiculed.

For some reason, Bitmoji classrooms — cute, virtual classrooms with comic versions of teachers, which had become all the rage — stressed me more than anything. That and our “bucket list” of required professional development courses intended to help.

“Did u make your Bitmoji class?” my much younger, cooler co-worker, Jennifer Kramer, texted me.

“No. I’m too computer illiterate.”

“U are not!!! I’m watching some girl on YouTube now who’s helpful! This is so fun! U have to make one. I’ll email u the YouTube link. She puts links in her slideshow for the day and videos like she’s super talented at virtual school lol.”

“But when do you use it?”

“Everyday. Like on whiteboard u put a link to ur daily slideshow or video.”

“I think I’m going to get fired.”

“Stopppppp.”

I had to wonder how I had managed to teach for 37 years without a Bitmoji.

Virtual meets brick and mortar 

When the 2020-21 school year started, I learned that while teenagers are great with their phones, many of my students were less tech-savvy than I when it came to computers, possibly because they hadn’t lived in the United States long. But together we forged ahead, helping each other along the way.

Once I knew what I was doing, I overcame my fear of teaching online and recording my lessons. The more computer literate I became, the prouder I felt, especially when I considered that when I started teaching in 1983, schools didn’t even have computers.

Normally, I taught for the first hour of class and then turned off my camera and muted myself while my students worked for the remaining 40 minutes. I’m grateful I didn’t say or do anything too embarrassing when I thought I was muted but wasn’t.

Quite a few times, while concentrating on grading papers, I was startled when a student piped up with a question. I wasn’t used to having my laptop suddenly speak to me. It was almost as if my students were living inside it.

When we were allowed to return to campus Sept. 21, 2020, two-thirds of PB County students chose to stay home, and teachers (one in 12) at risk of developing dangerous COVID-19 symptoms were allowed to teach from home.

If I had three “brick and mortar” students per class, that was a lot. Some came to school to see what it was like and never returned. I couldn’t blame them. I was instructed to sit behind the protective shield on my desk, teach into my computer, not walk around the room, not use physical books, and not give out papers. Basically, my “brick and mortar” students sat at their desks and watched me on their laptops.

I teach AICE English General Papers, which is an honors class for which students can receive college credit if they pass an exam in the spring. Half of that exam requires students to write a hand-written essay in 75 minutes without access to the internet. I told my students that they shouldn’t even look at the internet and that Google Classroom would highlight anything they plagiarized and provide me with the websites from which their material was taken. Still, their essays were plagued with plagiarism.

Getting them to write an essay in 75 minutes or even seven weeks was a challenge. We were encouraged to be lenient and let students make up work, but doing so didn’t allow me to adequately prepare them.

Many of us are bolder behind a computer screen than we would be in person, so it’s not surprising that I received this message from a virtual student: “If it's not one thing, it's another with this class. I have to wake up at 7:30 in the morning, and every time I come to your class I have an essay that has to be done by the time your class is over, like do you think I’m a computer, and I wake up ready to write an essay?”

This student didn’t have to get dressed or drive to school. She literally could wake up at 7:30. And my students wrote no more than two essays — which I accepted no matter how late they were — per nine weeks. (As long as I’m “throwing shade,” as my students would say, her actual words were “right an essay” and “imma” for “I’m a.”)

'Are you with us?' 

One of the biggest problems I faced was that virtual students weren’t required to show themselves or speak. They simply had to log on. But I didn’t want them to just log on and go back to sleep,  play video games, or watch TikTok, so I told them that if I called on them three times throughout our 100-minute class, and they didn’t respond, I would mark them absent.

That worked until I was told that if a student came to school, put his head down, and slept in class, I had to mark him present, so if he logged on and didn’t respond, I also had to mark him present.

One of the most frustrating parts of online teaching was the lack of participation. At times, I felt as if I were conducting a séance. “Is anybody there? David, are you with us? If you are, please give us a sign.”

We were told that we had to give students 24 (or was it 48?) hours to complete their work, but if it were a test or quiz, we could make it due at the end of the period.

However, if I gave students that much time to complete a simple assignment, most procrastinated and ended up not doing it. If I called it a test or quiz and made it due at the end of the period, though, most did it. So I started calling just about every assignment a test or quiz, and my students’ grades improved.

I had to wonder if the less demanding we were of students, the less they did and learned. In many ways, students never had it easier than last year: they could stay home, semester exams and EOC (End-of-Course) exams were canceled, seniors didn’t have to pass FSA (Florida Standard Assessment) or have any community service hours to graduate, and it didn’t matter how many tardies or absences they had.

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But in other ways, they never had it harder: some experienced the death of a loved one, got sick, were frightened or depressed, and/or had financial difficulties. They didn’t get to be with their friends or teachers at school, and they missed out on homecoming, prom, and Grad Bash. (We did have graduation with social distancing and masks.)

When my AICE students came to school to take their exam last May, some were offended that I didn’t know who they were, but they had never shown themselves in our Google Classroom. It was almost surreal to have taught students for an entire school year but to be seeing them for the first time in May.

Even with my “brick and mortar” students, I had only seen the top of their faces. Once, when a student lowered his mask to eat a snack, I blurted out, “That’s not how I pictured the bottom of your face!” We both laughed.

My students’ scores from their AICE exam confirm that there has indeed been a “COVID slide” (a loss of learning for students). Only 58% of my students who showed up to take both parts of their exam passed it, yet since I began teaching the course in 2014, one year 100% of my students passed, another year 99%, and another 98%.

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Staff shortages and contact tracing in the new school year 

For the 2021-22 school year, students and teachers have been required to come to school. However, Palm Beach County has more than 300 teaching vacancies, so for the first time, I’m teaching six classes instead of five, which means that every other day, I have no planning period. We also have a serious substitute shortage.

The first few weeks of school, I was sad seeing that if my students finished their work early and had a few minutes left at the end of class, they pulled out their phones instead of talking to each other. Had they lost the ability to interact with their peers other than by texting?

Now, when I have to hush them, I’m actually happy that they’re talking.

About 7% of my students have had COVID this year, and many more have been quarantined because they were sitting by those students. In late August, over 5,000 Palm Beach County students were being quarantined every day.

I feel bad for the administrators in charge of “contact tracing.” Whenever a student tests positive for COVID-19 (which, for a while, was daily), his classmates who were sitting near him in any of his seven classes have to be notified and — up until a new policy was adopted the third week of September — had to be quarantined. Then they had to be labeled “Q” in SIS (our Student Information System) so that teachers wouldn't mark them absent.

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The new policy allows parents to decide whether to quarantine their child if he or she was in “direct contact” with someone who tested positive — as long as their child doesn’t test positive or display symptoms.

I question how valid “contact tracing” is. We’re not tracing who sits next to whom at lunch, in the media center, on the bus, or in the gym — or who walks next to whom in the crowded hallways. Realistically, how can we?

And when we don’t have enough substitutes (which is a daily occurrence), those classes are split up. I’m often asked how many empty desks I have, and then those desks are filled with other teachers’ students; or the students are sent to the auditorium. What happens to contact tracing then?

We’ve been told to update our online seating charts for all classes on a daily basis, but I struggle to do so, even though I often arrive at school by 6 a.m. (we’re required to be there by 7:15), I often work through lunch, and I have student aides.

Fortunately, by the third week in September, the average number of students being quarantined daily in the county fell to 1,370 (due to decreased positive cases), and when our new policy was adopted, the number fell to 647 a day.

This year, although we've been encouraged to do "simultaneous teaching (to teach the students who come to school while also teaching the quarantined students), so far we haven't been required to.

I was fine doing so last year — when I had no more than a few students at a time in my classroom. In fact, in many ways, my job was easier. But I now have up to 30 students per class and can’t imagine teaching simultaneously.

I’ve been using Google Classroom to communicate with my students; but to post just one assignment in Google Classroom, I would have to scan it, download it, upload it, and then assign it one by one to students. And would those students even know how to do the assignment without my instruction?

Something else that has been difficult is that since Florida Standards Assessments and End Of Course exams were canceled last year but are required this year, too often I lose students to testing. And some of those exams, such as Algebra I or Geometry EOC, are for courses that students took last year or the year before and don’t remember.

Also, if students score well enough on the ACT or SAT, that score can replace the FSA requirement, so we spend time preparing students for those tests and administering them.

The changed teaching landscape 

It’s not all gloom and doom, though. My students don’t seem to be wishing for schools to close again. In fact, they seem to be grateful to be back and to realize that they didn’t learn nearly as much last year as they should have.

Also, in the years prior to the pandemic, when I had my students tell me about themselves in a letter the first week of school, I was disturbed by how many wrote that they had basically spent their summer watching Netflix. This year, quite a few wrote that they’ve learned to enjoy reading and writing. Perhaps there’s merit in reading and writing for pleasure.

On Nov. 7, 2017, my article “Why good teachers quit” was published, stating that I was planning to retire within the next four years — largely because “so much testing has diminished true learning.”

Sept. 30, 2021 — the last day of my DROP (Deferred Retirement Option Program) — was the day I was supposed to retire. But I requested and was granted a one-year extension. (I can request two more one-year extensions if I so desire. Those requests could also be denied.)

Why am I still teaching? Health insurance is expensive, and I can’t get Medicare for four more years. My students would probably have a substitute (if one could be found) if I had retired.

There are still days that I'm able to shut out whatever would put me over the edge and make me want to quit, go to what I’ve always called “my little classroom,” and do what I was hired to do and what I still enjoy doing: teach.

And, as I stated in 2017, “It still thrills me when I can make a difference in a student’s life. The frustration arises when we are kept from teaching.”

Janet Meckstroth Alessi has been teaching at John I. Leonard High School since 1983 and is a frequent contributor to Accent. She can be reached at jlmalessi@aol.com.