By Henry Neale, Community School of Davidson

I recognize that my experience as a teacher this past year probably differed in many important ways from other teachers. I was trying to take care of two kids at home along with our new Covid puppy. My kids are 13 and 16, so that was much easier to handle than teachers with young kids at home. My administration was very supportive and understanding of the situation teachers were put in last year and did their best to eliminate burdensome tasks while providing resources to help us make the required changes. I was also teaching two classes that I’ve taught before and had materials prepped and ready, and I felt pretty comfortable. I have no idea how teachers with little kids at home were able to handle teaching remotely while also taking care of kids at home. My kids are pretty self-sufficient, but we definitely had our home yelling conversations as we battled for bandwidth from three different rooms. And in that way, along with several others, I imagine that my experiences, both good and bad, from the 2020-21 school year will resemble the experiences of many teachers. Here are some things I noticed, learned from, and am planning for as we move toward the 21-22 school year.

Teachers and schools are amazingly flexible

Prior to the pandemic, I only had the typical limited personal experience of changing the format and medium that I use to teach. Then suddenly, just like teachers across the country, I had to learn how to use a new technology and tried to find a way to connect with my students over Zoom (which is virtually impossible, by the way). There is an art in connecting with high school teenagers, but Zoom makes such an art akin to oil painting with a push broom. Making this type of change on the fly while trying to stay current with the curriculum would have been seen as a ludicrous request in non-pandemic times. Yet, extraordinary times often leave only previously-unimaginable options. So, teachers took on this challenge the same way they take on so many other challenges — by simply jumping in and doing as well as possible.

Keep in mind, making adjustments as a teacher is expected. Even so, what impressed me the most was the way that so many teachers, schools, and school systems recognized the needs of their most vulnerable students and found ways to provide internet, instructional materials, and even food to that population. Without question, Covid helped shed light on the range of services schools provide, and I don’t think there was a large city in our country that didn’t struggle with this issue. And for all those elementary school teachers who were concerned enough about the well-being of their vulnerable students to initiate a myriad of efforts to provide for the needs of those kids, I salute you. It is my hope that one thing our country may learn from this pandemic is that other organizations should be taking on some of these responsibilities. As a high school teacher, it was hard to pivot to teaching through Zoom, but I was generally only worried about how well my students were learning. The situation for K-5 teachers was significantly different. They not only had to struggle with a really ineffective teaching tool (how can you teach a six-year-old to read over Zoom?!), but they were also really worried about the physical and social-emotional well-being of their students. One benefit of Covid was that the general public learned of these problems. Maybe now is the time to start equipping schools with the appropriate staff, training, time, resources, and perhaps even compensation.

Instruction is a small part of school

We all know this without giving it much thought, but the socialization of our kids, K-8 in particular, may be the most valuable component of our educational system. There are a lot of really important things kids need to learn, but I don’t think any subject matter we teach them is as important as the socialization kids get from being in school together. My high school students who can drive, whether ill-advised or not, were able to socialize on their own. But for young students who can’t drive themselves anywhere and don’t work, Covid essentially eliminated all healthy social activities. As we, hopefully, move back toward normal school operation, I have no doubt that these social components will be more appreciated and prioritized. I hope that we will continue to value this aspect of education without another reminder.

There are some really good tools out there

Prior to Covid, I had already started creating a bank of slideshows so that students could access my notes from class at any time. Mainly because I had to, I learned how to use Screencastify and other recording methods to record my lessons. I added these recordings to my slideshows so that now kids would not only have access to my notes from class, but actually have access to me teaching various lessons and solving different problems. I still need to work on making these recordings more interactive, but as far as providing a convenient resource for all students, nothing competes. If a kid has to miss class for some reason or is stuck at home for an extended period of time, I now have a fairly easy method to help keep this student current with the material. Although kids didn’t find my recorded lessons nearly as effective as in-person instruction, having access to and some experience with this type of technology is extremely valuable. That genie won’t be going back into that bottle.

Kids have missed a lot

As laudable as some technologies may be, there is no substitute for in-person, teacher-student and student-student interactions. I’ve discussed the social impacts, but the instructional ramifications are significant as well. My students lost a year of practice talking to each other and trying to express their ideas and convey their thoughts to each other. And I wasn’t there to help them improve their ability to do so. Certainly the impact will be felt more poignantly at different grade levels, but when we did come back to school at 50% capacity, I could tell that my students were not where they would normally be when it came to communicating their ideas. Teachers are going to have to change their instruction over the next few years to help fill this hole by giving kids more time to communicate with each other during class and more instruction on how to communicate effectively. I plan on assigning more group projects next year that require my students to work together during and outside of class to help target this particular issue. I hope that college professors are prepared for the incoming freshmen class and this additional challenge.

Feedback

Something I really enjoy as a teacher is hearing students explain their mathematical thinking. I also think I’m pretty good at taking a student’s thinking and guiding them to a deeper understanding. I found it exceptionally difficult to provide my students with the feedback they needed when teaching remotely. I did have some one-on-one Zoom sessions which worked fairly well, but these meetings were exceptionally inefficient. I usually walk around the room while students work together and alone on problems and give little nudges where they are needed. So much of my interaction with students relies on me being able to listen to conversations occurring throughout my classroom. Reading facial expressions and body language plays an important role especially when you’re trying to make sure students avoid becoming overly frustrated. You just can’t do that working remotely, visiting five different Break Out rooms. And even when we did move to 50% capacity, the time I spent interacting with my students was still greatly restricted.

My students also missed out on getting to talk to each other which can be both efficient and effective. Kids tend to communicate about things with each other using different language than I would use, and hearing those conversations is really helpful to me both to hear how my students understand the ideas that I’m expressing while also teaching me new ways to express ideas using different language. It’s really neat to hear new ways to talk about things especially when those expressions are in the language the kids use. But this year, the kids and I both missed out on this unique aspect of the mathematics classroom. There aren’t many courses where students are asked to express the type of critical thinking required to solve tough math problems. But all of these benefits of having students in person in the classroom were lost, or at least greatly diminished, this year. I really missed this type of interaction this year, but I fear that the impact on my students was really damaging. I will see some of my students from last year again this coming year, and I will get a chance to try to fill in those gaps. I’ll also be able to see first hand how big that gap is. But many of my students are going to head off to college having missed an entire year of critical communication. I’m quite anxious about how I’m going to manage this situation next year, and I worry about how frustrated my students might become. I believe this will be our greatest academic challenge coming out of this pandemic.

And final reflections

Looking back on the past year, not that we’re quite post-pandemic yet, I’m so impressed and proud to be part of a group of professionals who handled tremendous change so readily while also finding new ways to incorporate technologies to overcome potentially crippling challenges. I have a hard time imagining another industry, especially one as large as ours, pivoting in such a tremendous fashion so abruptly. That said, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be a health care worker; too horrific. I also want to highlight the humorous moments of the previous year, such as the text I received from one of my students five minutes after I’d lost internet. They may have seen a frozen image of me, but I just went right on teaching, failing completely to notice that all the looks on my students’ faces had frozen in place. I also recall yelling at my two kids upstairs for them to take out the dog. And yes, I decided that me teaching my students was more important than my kids attending their Zoom classes.

Uncertainty and unknowns surrounded us throughout the 2020-21 academic year. We innovated and found ways beyond what our pre-pandemic selves probably could have imagined. We are not in a post-pandemic world yet, but even when we are, we will still teach to the best of our ability given whatever circumstances are thrown at us. Education will benefit from what we've learned this past year, and we’ve all received a nice reminder of how important it is to keep our eye on our students and ourselves, especially as we move toward a new version of normal. We've learned new things, and we have lost aspects of our previous educational journey. We must now rally between grades and educational institutions to create an environment that will help students gain both the depth and breadth of understanding required. We’ll just have to do so in new and adjusted ways.

Henry Neale currently teaches Precalculus and AP Calculus at The Community School of Davidson. He’s been teaching for 26 years and has taught a range of math courses from 5th grade up through AP Stats and AP Calculus. He’s also taught Physics and, as part of his dissertation work, helped develop K-5 professional development activities.