During the Pandemic, Teaching Is a Whole, New Ballgame

It’s like starting at square one. Going in blind. For some, it’s like being a first year teacher all over again. 

“We [teachers] all felt we were starting from scratch.” Señora Bonnie Rivera, a Spanish teacher at East Longmeadow High School, says of the transition to fully remote learning. 

Teachers received two weeks of support, professional development, and prep time before the start of school this year. Yet remote learning has turned out to be a challenge for even veteran teachers. 

“We had faculty meetings every week so that was helpful because teachers could be like, “this is what I’m doing and it’s working” or “this is what I’m doing and it’s not working.” So that was definitely a huge feeling of support there.” says a Massachusetts high school teacher participating in the Suddenly Distant Research Project.

Teachers now face the challenge of organizing all of their lesson plans to fit online learning. Like students, teachers take on the stress and difficulty of navigating online teaching as a regular school day schedule.  

By learning how to teach through a computer screen, teachers across the country feel as though it is their first year of teaching. With teachers never being trained or taught how to teach fully remote in their education or work experience until this summer, typical lessons and engagement activities have been updated to fit an online format. 

 Mr. Timothy Mullett, a Birchland Park Middle School civics teacher, says his in-school teaching style revolves around interactive activities. He uses student debates, class discussions, and reenactments of United States history. 

Interactive lessons, Mr. Mullett says, allow his students to better retain information in lessons that might often be considered boring. Mr. Mullett has redesigned his lesson plans in an attempt to keep their students engaged in class. 

For one favorite lesson among Mr. Mullett’s current and former students, he manages to transform his entire classroom into “The White Horse Tavern,” decorating his classroom with fake candles, lamps hanging from the ceiling, brick wallpaper, fake vines, and desks set up as restaurant tables.

This created a space where arguments and debating can occur naturally, without the pressure of a typical classroom setting. By putting a unique spin on the debate, he encouraged his students to use their voices and contribute to the debate.

Student by student, Mr. Mullett kicked his students out of the “White Horse Tavern” and into the hallway after they had contributed enough to the debate. By kicking his students out after their contributions, it gave the chance for every student to speak freely and to participate in the debate activity. 

This will be one of the activities Mr. Mullett says he will miss doing the most. 

 “The students are getting the same lessons. Whether they are getting the same experience, no.” Mullett says in regard to students losing the opportunity to engage in the in class activities his students normally get to engage in. Without these activities, his students don’t have the same chance to experience expressing themselves and their opinions within his class while also learning. 

Students become more politically aware in middle school. Mr. Mullett wants to give his students the facts from an unbiased point of view that will allow his students to develop their own political and personal opinions without influence from their parents or friends. Using these student involved lessons, it puts students on the spot and through healthy peer pressure, students start to become more comfortable in expressing their own opinions. 

Now that all East Longmeadow Public Schools are fully remote, Mr. Mullett is forced to put these lessons on hold. He has to rearrange his lessons without these interactive in class activities. While teachers like Mr. Mullett are able to teach all of the lessons in their curriculum, the experience of the class isn’t the same. 

This past spring, teachers faced a different reality of online teaching. Teachers were only required to assign one assignment per week, and often only held an online class once or twice a week. 

This school year however, teachers have had to create a long term plan to carry out online learning, as Covid-19 was not as temporary of a problem as everyone once thought it would be in. 

East Longmeadow teachers have had to completely reevaluate their lesson plans and ways of teaching in order to accommodate students.

Señora Bonnie Rivera,  an ELHS Spanish teacher, emphasizes the difficulty of creating relationships and getting to know students over a computer screen. Students often choose to stay muted during remote learning and sneak looks at their phones, Señora Rivera said. “I definitely miss seeing my students everyday in class.” 

Going from seeing your students face to face everyday and creating personal relationships with each individual student, to struggling to engage students over a computer screen has been especially difficult,a problem teachers across the country face on a daily basis. 

Online teaching has forced teachers to try and find a fine line of discovering new ways to engage students, while also ensuring that all lessons are covered in a timely manner. 

With the homework limits established across all of East Longmeadow Public Schools, teachers have to decide what can be taught in class, what assignments need to be completed, and how not to assign too much homework; all while trying to finish an entire curriculum in a one semester course. 

Like many other East Longmeadow High School teachers, Señora Rivera has always made sure her students know she cares about all of her students and that they have an adult within the school they can talk to without judgement. Whether it be day to day conversations with students about their day or more serious conversations, Señora Rivera always interacts with many of her students throughout the school day. 

Due to online learning, teachers like Señora Rivera often don’t get the chance to get to know or talk to their students as much because they are no longer in the same building where quick, casual conversations can easily arise. 

Teachers also struggle to engage their students in their class while also trying to get through all of the lessons in their curriculum.  With no teacher having the same exact teaching style, every teacher in every subject area faces varying difficulties in teaching fully remote.

 Science teachers have adapted their class to use virtual labs instead of the hands-on learning created in an in-school lab experiment or investigation. English teachers have had to find pdf formatted novels to read in class. Math teachers have had to find online tools and calculators to demonstrate lessons and formulas for students. 

In January, the East Longmeadow School Committee plans to reconsider remote learning for the second semester of the school year.