School's Out: Online Learning & Covid-19
BY GABE HART
My life has always been directed by the rhythm of a school year. It’s like going for a long drive to an out-of-state destination. When you first start out, you’re excited about your destination. You’re not thinking of the hours upon hours you’ll spend in the car. After a while, though, the seat doesn’t feel as comfortable but you don’t have a choice. You just have to keep going. The longest part of any trip is when you’re almost there. If you’re going somewhere you’ve been before, you learn to look for memory markers that are near your destination — an old billboard or a convenience store along the interstate where you always seem to stop. When you see these reminders, you know you’re close. You relax a little. The excitement returns. It’s the beauty of any journey, really. The anticipatory start of it, the plodding middle, and the denouement.
Up until this year, thirty-five of my years as a student or a teacher have played out exactly like this: a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s some comfort in that rhythm; the ebb and flow of certainty. August is always slow, but the grass is still green and the days are still long. When the weather turns, I know Christmas isn’t far off. By February, though, fatigue has set in and we’re all (students and teachers) hanging by a thread. Then the days start to get longer, and you can hear the mowers humming outside the classroom — the familiar markers of the end of the year. We all start to relax a little. There are the end of year awards days, graduations, proms, and student-faculty basketball games. The student-teacher boundaries aren’t quite as rigid. We can all be ourselves a little bit easier. It’s the reward for the hard work of teaching and learning and building relationships with one another while trying to teach what a gerund is or trying to explain why that’s even important.
This year’s end was sudden, like the snap of a finger. A Thanos sized finger. It was jarring and abrupt. Our car broke down before we made it to our town.
I was in Texas for Spring Break when I got the call that school would be closed for the week we were supposed to return due to COVID-19. One week became two weeks. Two weeks became the end of March which became the end of April. Time was stretching itself out. Mondays and Tuesdays and Fridays all felt the same. We had to scramble to figure out how to teach our kids. Then we realized that we had to figure out how to feed our kids.
Every student in the Jackson-Madison County School System eats free breakfast and lunch. Two-thirds of their daily meals are covered on the days that school is in session. We have students in our district and at the school where I teach who depend on those meals to eat something substantial. There were a lot of things our administration had to figure out on the fly.
As a teacher, my job was to send work to students that they could access online. Each school had a slightly different plan to disseminate work to students. The majority of our students’ work was done online, but we also provided physical packets for pickup. Soon, however, I realized that “learning at home” material was secondary to what the needs of middle school students are.
My daughter turned 13 in January. Her seventh grade year was also cut short due to COVID. Here’s what I’m learning about teenagers that I logically understood, but had never directly experienced: teenagers need to be around other teenagers. What’s great about living in 2020 is that being around someone can be physical or virtual. She texts her friends and sends “snaps” to them, but there’s something intangibly valuable about being in another person’s physical presence.
Here’s what I’m learning about teenagers that I logically understood, but had never directly experienced: teenagers need to be around other teenagers.
I began to wonder about my students and how they were dealing with something that none of us were ready to experience. I took a break from assigning work and I sent them four questions to answer about what their life has been like since everything stopped. The questions were straightforward and are listed below along with some answers I got back:
How has it been doing work online instead of in a classroom?
Has it been weird not being able to see your friends and teachers at school?
Are you ready to get back to normal? Why or why not?
Anything else you want to personally add about what the last two months has been like.
Well, the last two months have been life changing to me. I went to Knoxville to visit and then decided to move here to be closer to family, but I’m scared to go to school here because I thought I was going to go to high school with all my friends (in Jackson), but now I’m meeting all new people.
These last two months have been okay other than not being able to get away from my family. I have painted three pictures and I have started back sewing, so that’s a plus.
Trying to do stuff at home sucks. It’s so much harder to try to focus because I would rather do anything else, especially since I’m at home where my games and dogs and internet are.
I guess I don’t like the whole idea of school, but I miss being there. If I can be completely honest, this whole quarantine situation really sucks. Not being able to see people that you see as family or your actual family is horrible.
Four different perspectives from four different students. This is only a glimpse of what most of my students are experiencing during this time: boredom, uncertainty, loneliness, creativity, fear. It is a mix of good and bad like all of us are experiencing, but these students are experiencing all of these things at the most challenging age possible — adolescence.
There have been countless memes illustrating the challenges of parents trying to teach their kids during this universal home-schooling phase of our lives. These parents extol the work of teachers and the job that we do because they’re realizing that it’s not easy. It’s not necessarily true that our jobs are hard (they can be), but the dynamic of a parent teaching their own child is nearly impossible. I’ve tried it myself, and it didn’t end well.
What I have learned, though, is that assigning my students work for them to do on their own isn’t nearly as important as just checking in with them during this time. I’ve found that being a parent is more about trying to figure out what tomato sauce to use on our homemade pizza so it doesn’t taste like Spaghetti-O’s rather than helping my daughter find symbolism in a short story.
Our rhythms are broken sometimes. The sudden end to them can be harsh. We recover from the whiplash as fast and effectively as we can, but most of the time that means stumbling on until we figure it out.
I haven’t been a perfect online teacher because I don’t know how to be. My students haven’t been perfect online learners because some of them don’t have the resources to be. We’re all just moving forward as well as we can. That’s really all any of us can do at a time like this.
Gabe Hart is an English and Language Arts teacher at Northeast Middle School. He was born and raised in Jackson, graduating from Jackson Central-Merry in 1997 and Union University in 2001. Gabe enjoys spending time and traveling with his daughter, Jordan, who is eight years old. His hobbies include reading, writing, and playing sports . . . even though he’s getting too old for the last one. Gabe lives in Midtown Jackson and has a desire to see all of Jackson grow together.