Parents have been facing real challenges in juggling their children’s education while working to provide for their families.
Parents ponder… how do I educate my child if they can’t go to school and how do I provide for their safety if they can’t stay at home? Parents certainly deserve their own thank you.
Meanwhile, during the pandemic, parents and other adults have developed a deep appreciation of our teachers.
Teachers are living promises of a future full of hope and dreams. They connect their students’ insatiable brains with the best science, literature, math, and art. Bit by evolving bit, they ensure that each moment is better than the last, each day better than yesterday —each person their own better angel.
During this pandemic, teachers are a panacea to our panic. We take for granted that we will heal — physically and emotionally. We confidently rest our scattered minds about the general health of our society because we trust the excellence of first responders. While we don’t verbalize it, that very trust comes from a breathtaking amount of reverence and deference we give to our teachers.
We don’t verbalize it. We really should though. The pandemic has been hard on our teachers. Teachers have two extremely important jobs: they not only teach children but they serve as their guardians during the day. Never before has this duality been as apparent as now when parents struggle with educating their student at home without teachers who teach online, or finding a place for their child to be when their teacher is teaching online.
It started with spring break and COVID turned it into spring broken. The students never returned back to school after their week off, overwhelming parents who needed someone to save the day. Enter our modern hero, donning a pashmina cardigan instead of cape: the teacher.
This was not an easy or even understood job. Technology did not exist for teachers really. Google scrambled to keep up with demand. Teachers had to create their own online curriculum, learn an online education platform, and then combine the two, hoping that their students would be able to adjust better. This was not an easy task.
A third-grade teacher at Self Development Academy, Jamie Smith, emphasized, “It was so abrupt, and the teachers had to adapt to the online platform quickly. I felt like a student myself having to learn google classroom.”
It is important to note that when Mrs. Smith uses the phrase learn google classroom, she is not referring to a single program that she, and the rest of the teachers needed to learn. In fact, she is actually referring to many, many different tasks, programs, skills, and communication platforms.
One learns google classroom the same way that one learns the complete physics of the universe. This is to say, learning google classroom is an amalgam of an infinite number of small, difficult, unfamiliar tasks. How do I record and edit video? How do I convert physical material to digital format? How do I get it to students? How do I even know what to do? How do I post grades? How do I create quizzes?
Mrs. Oliver, who has been with SDA for nearly two decades, emotes, “I cried for a full day, thinking that I’d never get google classroom.”
Mrs. Smith reflects, “I had a few crying moments as others did. It was a big adjustment for everyone.”
Researching for this article reminded me of how lucky Self Development Academy (SDA) has been in teacher retention. At SDA, an advanced K-8 charter school where I work, we do our best to deliver all that our teachers deserve.
A popular teacher at the Phoenix campus, Ms. Lauren White, discloses that, “When I go home every day, I feel as though I hadn’t done enough. I feel frustrated with myself because I know how much better they can do and I can do.”
One of SDA’s master teachers, Mrs. Annmarie Rivera, our Mesa’s 4th/5th grade teacher, shares a common refrain, paraphrasing: “Do I have enough to attend to their needs? What if my kids get sick?”
We do not take for granted how fortunate we are to have the teachers we have at our schools. I’ll be frank, there are many times, I too, like Phoenix math teacher Ms. White, have been plagued by the question, “What could I have done better?” “How could I help my teachers?”
What I realized though is that what makes SDA effective is also what makes us unable to do everything we would like to do for our teachers. The drastic, abrupt change was ubiquitously the most brutal pang.
Still, seven months later, I wonder how could I have met the needs of our justifiably inconsolable parents needing online teachers to safely teach their children with our justifiably inconsolable teachers needing someone to slowly train them before moving fully online.
There are no good solutions. There are only good people.
The year 2020 is about confronting hard, persistent, systematic problems: health care, criminal justice, and disaster preparedness. We have certainly been thoroughly educated in the axiom that no one’s actions are perfectly good. We all emanate consequences. The world ripples with the composite of our choices and at the end of our life our good can be best seen in the future we have helped build.
That is easy for teachers. Teachers have a unique role. Success is passion interlocked with ability. Ask any school teacher, and they will tell you that their job is really about interlocking passion with ability.
Thank you, teachers, everywhere.
For more information about Self Development Academy, please call (480) 641-2640.