Pandemic Education
On March 13th, 2020, I told my third-grade students to clear out their desks and pack anything essential because we would have to stay home, for what we thought would be two weeks, to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. It was a Friday, the end of a particularly hectic week with a full moon, time change due to daylight savings, and change of the season. Anyone who has ever worked in education in any capacity, will know that the combination of these events can make for a very stressful day. As we packed our belongings, the fear of uncertainty filled the room like a nimbus cloud, bigger than the ones we studied in our science unit. Two weeks became fifty-two, and we are still in the middle of the storm.
My third graders and I were all students in a class with the harshest teacher—The Pandemic. Without a doubt, it has been one of the most challenging years of my career as an educator. Before entering the field of education, I was aware that I would have to wear many hats as a teacher, but I never imagined that my modus operandi would be tested the way it has. We weren't ready for a pandemic, but we put in the time and effort to make it all work for our students, it's the essence of the job.
Expectations fluctuated daily, as did the news. We learned a batch of new skills, implemented a new reading curriculum, and became familiar with several pieces of technology like a crash course to serve our students in a virtual setting. As teachers, we worked extra hours to develop our virtual learning environments, assisting students with technology issues, experimenting with classroom management techniques, and, most importantly, building student-teacher relationships virtually.
My home became my workplace, and it was nearly hard to tell the two apart. Many days, I worked late at night learning new online tools, grade student assessments, plan lessons, and create instructional slides for the next day. Since the beginning of this school year, I have learned more practical skills from other educators on Tik-Tok than from my district's mandatory professional development trainings. I was open to new ideas and I used any help I could get. Through Facebook support groups, I've connected with educators from across my school district and around the country to offer support, provide resources, and share experiences. There's power in collaboration and community. Without each other, we would not have been able to get through such a challenging year.
The mosaic round table I used for playing games on my balcony is now sitting in my living room as an "alternative work location" during the week. The indigo blue tiles remind me of the ocean that kisses the coast of Rio. The shape of the tiles make me long for my home country, Brazil. I have a feeling that traveling will be difficult for a while, so I appreciate these moments of memory. My parents have observed continuous lockdowns but no sign of mass immunization. Despite being fully vaccinated, I am wary of traveling to visit my parents who are not.
Between juggling all of my work and my anxieties, I am burning out. I am just making it through each day. I would lay awake many late nights, unable to sleep, thinking of too many worst-case scenarios and feeling the weight of my fears as I worried about the safety of my loved ones. But the next day, I'd get up with puffy eyes from crying all night and put all of my concerns aside so that I could be fully present for my students and give them the greatest lesson possible. Since the COVID outbreak, I've been unable to fall asleep before midnight, and insomnia has been a major problem for me. I drink more coffee than I should in the mornings to keep myself going, and glasses of wine in the evenings to disconnect from never ending anxiety. I've said aloud, "I'm so overwhelmed" far too many times. It has become a mantra for me.
I am a Brazilian-American educator and author residing in Maryland. This is the end of my third year of elementary school teaching, and I adore teaching third grade. Before becoming a teacher, I worked as a human resources specialist for a government contractor and a home stylist for a modern furniture store. In Brazil, I became a trained and certified electrician, which made me fall in love with making connections. Working with young children piqued my interest once I moved to the United States as an Au Pair. Although my Au Pair experience ignited the spark to become an educator, marrying one was the final push to pursue the career. A typical day in my classroom is filled with enthusiastic discussions and project-based learning. Distance learning limited the amount of pen-and-paper and hands-on projects we were able to do, but we discovered new ways to engage students in learning, such as online educational games, inquiry-based learning, and multimedia projects.
One of the most important lessons I've learned this year is that strong relationships are the foundation of everything. We used Zoom to establish connections in a year in which we reached out to families and communities like never before. The value of these relationships cannot be overstated. As educators, we engaged in a continuous process to ensure students had access to Chromebooks and functioning internet to attend school. As a result, teachers became technology support for students and parents navigating new learning platforms from home.
I acknowledge the privilege of my school to have access to the tools needed to fulfill our learning community's instructional requirements. However, too many new resources designed to make learning and managing technology easier had the opposite effect, making students rapidly become overwhelmed. We created solutions by adding checklists, calendars, and assignment trackers, which worked for some students but not for others. Imagine going from mostly hands-on learning to completing all assignments virtually. Students everywhere were forced to acquire new technology skills at lightning speed and do their best in their home environments.
Every morning at my school, teachers and students spend the first ten-fifteen minutes of the day connecting on a socio-emotional level, greeting, sharing, and participating in a group activity. Morning meetings set a positive tone for learning, and we never skip them. Naturally, the students miss this kind of socialization and spending time in each other's company. In our meetings, we've had essential discussions in response to the critical events this year regarding racial justice, voting rights, and violence. In response to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, the Equity Initiatives Unit in our district developed an anti-racist social studies curriculum that helped facilitate many necessary conversations in class.
A significant first step towards a more inclusive and less whitewashed curriculum. As an immigrant, multiracial, Latinx woman, I am very aware of the diversity imbalance in institutions because it also impacts me and other people of color. Racial disparity in schools and curriculum, don’t reflect our diverse communities, and it only promotes further division and it only favors the dominant culture. Teaching in a predominantly White and affluent school made my mission to create mirrors for my students of color to see themselves represented and windows for all to see through different perspectives in the curriculum.
Teachers were widely praised for their efforts in the classroom at the start of the pandemic. Families also encountered challenges in helping their children navigate the novice way of schooling. I could scroll down my social media feed and see many videos of parents, school officials, and the media, acknowledging that the teaching profession is tough and demanding. Some were vocal about teachers deserving a better pay for all they do. I wish this energy would've lasted, but it didn't.
This year, teachers went from the martyrs to the villains of a story they didn't even write. There was a lot of tension surrounding whether students should return to in-person instruction at the beginning of the school year. The "Return to School" was met with divided opinions. However, the pandemic was at its peak, and the school building was not a safe environment to return to at the time. It was a "Return to the Building," in my opinion, because children were never absent from school. They were receiving their education virtually.
Part of the public vilified teachers for exhibiting the fear of cross-contamination in a building with poor ventilation or lacking space for proper social distancing. I was scared not only for my life but the lives of my colleagues, my students, and their families. Many individuals in the public appear to have forgotten that educators care for their lives and the lives of loved ones like everyone else. Those who argued that students were not learning never seemed to consider that children, too, were surviving during the pandemic. It is also important to remember that the socio economic reality of our students of color vary drastically in different areas of the district, which impacts student engagement, achievement, and access to resources and quality education. This year has once again highlighted blatant racial and income disparities in our society.
As we approached a full year into this madness, we finally saw the light with the [slow but moving] distribution of vaccines. The Board of Education decided on a return to the school building for in-person instruction. Teachers were understandably concerned about the return. No one knew what the plan would look like with so many ‘what if' scenarios. Fortunately, once it became available, educators could receive COVID vaccination about the same time as they returned. I was fully vaccinated by the time I returned to the building, which alleviated my fears. Families were given the option to remain virtual or return to face-to-face instruction, so the plans varied from school to school. In my case, I returned to the building to teach both virtual and face-to-face students simultaneously.
Teaching face-to-face and virtual simultaneously have been one of the most demanding professional challenges I've ever undertaken. I am fortunate to teach in a double-sized classroom, with students' desks spaced six feet apart, a Promethean board in the front, and access to a desktop and a laptop. The Internet bandwidth of the school was saturated with most students concurrently utilizing their devices at the school, forcing the internet to collapse at times during the instruction time.
My face now is covered with two masks, eyeglasses, and a microphone to help me protect the most powerful tool - my voice. All of this juggling act is happening while I make sure students in the back hear me and the students at home are engaged. I walk around the classroom all day, pushing a rolling cart with my computer giving instruction, answering questions, modeling content, and meeting the needs of all my face-to-face and virtual students. My feet scream to get out of my shoes at the end of the day. When I get home, I change my clothes, lay on my couch, and watch the world spin for twenty minutes.
We have now entered the final quarter and fortunately, State Tests have been canceled this year. Therefore, my third-graders won't have to add two weeks worth of anxiety-inducing testing to their lives. We are equipped as educators to differentiate teaching to satisfy the needs of our various learners, so that they can achieve and succeed academically. Standardized evaluations such as these, however, are precisely the opposite. I'm happy that this year they have been canceled.
We have a lot to celebrate on the last day of this school year. In view of all the difficulties this year, we'll finish third grade safe, healthy, and successful. I notice how much my students have grown, both personally and academically. The flexibility and understanding of both school and family circumstances, individual's mental health, and technology conditions, were critical elements for this school year's success.
Connecting with my students as equals helped equalize any power imbalances between student and teacher. The part of being a teacher that no one talks about is that we make a little family and say goodbye every year. I am very fortunate to have had such an incredible group of students. My class went through this journey with me, showing determination, building trust, and showing resilience when things had to change so fast or didn't go as planned.
This year has been a hell of a roller coaster ride filled with emotions that I never imagined I would experience at the same time—fear, anger, anxiety, panic, exhaustion, defeat, and depression. Every day spent with a roof over my head, job stability, and a healthy body became the blessings I do not take for granted. I live for the day when the clouds will part, and eventually, the storm will end.
