When clasrooms go digital – a teacher’s view

May 22. By 10:35 the last student had left our morning Zoom meeting and I was alone in the virtual meeting room, seeing myself in the camera, and wondering if I needed another cup of coffee before looking over the day’s first completed assignments. By the 36th day of distance learning during a pandemic we had fallen into a routine.

Perhaps “fallen” isn’t the right word. To fall into a routine indicates a passivity that doesn’t reflect the true nature of our springtime classroom. It might be better to say that we blazed a routine, or even better to say that we hacked our way through a dense forest of obstacles to make a pathway that even by the end was beset with brambles.

In our household, we had four people daily engaged in distance learning: my husband and I, each struggling to keep our students happy and learning; our youngest son, a high school freshman, and our oldest, a college junior. Scheduling home locations for Zoom meetings required a color-coded spreadsheet and four mini-offices with lighting, snarled knots of cords for various devices, and earbuds all over. Over the weeks, each space has also accumulated a motley supply of items that my husband and I used for classroom demonstrations, like a box of magnetic tiles to show how 3D objects can be built from nets and a cube-shaped lamp to demonstrate volume.

The transition from using these kinds of physical teaching aids in the classroom with our students to virtual teaching was rocky. In the early days of April, my husband and I spent long hours at our computers to coach students through the technology tools that we were using. Their messages and responses to us came through multiple channels--emails, comments on Classroom posts, comments on assignments, messages sent through other apps. As they worked to find the “Submit” button in Google Classroom and set up their own workstations, we struggled a bit with the technologies, too. Could I add a co-teacher on a learning website? How could I schedule assignments to post at 7:00 am? Why wasn’t my carefully crafted Google Form working correctly? What would be the best tool to use to teach a concept? Am I assigning too much work? Not enough?

For both of us, the best parts of our days of distance learning were the times when we connected with students, whether it was in our daily meetings or in one-on-one tutoring sessions. We both got to see more pets than we ever imagined, from Dalmations to gerbils to newly-hatched chicks. Siblings made their appearances too, whether it was to offer a comment or crawl across the screen.

The video sessions were also important opportunities for students to connect with us and share what was going on in their lives during such a difficult time. At least twice a week one of us belted out an off-key version of “Happy Birthday” with students. (My husband’s third-graders joined in. My sixth graders found it amusing to let the teachers sing alone.)

Because this switch to online teaching happened in the spring, we already had robust classroom climates of positive sharing and joint goals. Even with these supports in place, though, our online learning sessions just weren’t the same. There is a magic to the physical classroom, a spark of learning that connects teacher and students with a synergy that transcends content objectives and state standards. With us all being in different places, this spark felt a little dimmer, in a way that made us appreciate the daily small interactions of the physical classroom even more.

I was always delighted to receive requests for help on an assignment, because these individual sessions were the times that felt the most like regular instruction. Talking a student through the formula for volume or reading aloud questions for a reading comprehension activity together--these were the interactions that made our days.

As we look forward to the fall, uncertainty remains. Will we be in our classrooms? Will we be learning virtually once more? As teachers, we’re both proud of the effort that we put forth to make this situation work. However, I think that many other teachers would agree that a student said it best: “Mrs. Kissner, I can’t wait to come back to school!”

Emily Kissner teaches 6th Grade for the Upper Adams School District. Her essay was prepared for the Gettysburg Democracy for America Education Task Force.