Starting My Career as a Teacher During COVID-19
/On the morning of March 14th, 2020, I woke up to an email from my host teacher for student teaching, asking me if I had seen the announcement that all Michigan schools were closing for at least three weeks in an effort to flatten the curve. A hundred thoughts and feelings washed over me in a matter of seconds, but I knew that I would do whatever it took for my students to learn. We spent the following ten hours running around like mad, trying to make copies of enough work for the students to continue with, making sure all lockers were emptied, and trying to explain to a group of seven-year-olds what was happening, all the while worrying if they were going to be safe and well-fed during this unexpected period of being home with their families.
Since the day we sent our students home for the last time this year (a fact no one could have seen coming), there have been a million and one questions about logistics, teaching and learning from home, and surviving this pandemic that struck our world so fiercely.
Parents wonder how they are going to manage teaching their kids from home, when their own jobs are demanding they continue working either at home or as essential workers. In an article from the New York Times, one mom speculates why there is such an overload of assignments for students to complete, and pleads the education system to ‘ease up’. I have even had conversations with my own mother, where she vented her own frustrations with the limitations set by my sisters’ school district on how learning would happen to satisfy the needs of all learners, even those with limited resources.
Teachers are receiving instructions from administration on how to move forward, trying to cope with instructing children from videos instead of seeing their smiling faces right in front of us, opening up online platforms for learners to receive collaboration and feedback, and wondering how to ensure they are placing their learners in the best possible position to meet all standards for their grade. It is not lost on us that we have students who have only checked in a couple of times, and it keeps us up at night knowing that our students might be suffering in more ways than we know during this time of unpredictable circumstances.
Administrators are worried about funding and resources for education dropping significantly, as our economy falls into the recession it is likely to once we are (relatively) safe from COVID-19, and how to mandate instruction that is best for their respective districts. From an economic standpoint given by a professor of economics at Central Michigan University, Dr. Jason Taylor, it is likely that our country will not bounce back quite as easily as we did from previous national emergencies (Spanish flu, WWII), because our nation is no longer reliant on a manufacturing economy due to globalization and specialization in countries that have the best resources to produce products. In addition, Dr. Frim Ampaw, who specializes in higher education with an economics background at Central Michigan University, speculated on the impact COVID-19 could have across the board in education, most specifically that colleges and universities could be forced to close their doors due to students staying home. Her account of potential changes in K-12 notes that there could be many shifts in the role of education, highlighting a greater emphasis on the use of online tools, and changes made in the politics of education based in how things are run higher up in the hierarchy of education.
With the potential for the stay at home order lasting longer than expected, teachers are now forced to think of what to do in the fall. How do you welcome a new class of students online? How do you form community with students who can’t/won’t show up in the ways that you had hoped they would? How do we continue to prepare these early learners to thrive in later years of education when we can’t be right there with them? Will I begin my first-year teaching in a new community from my apartment couch?
There was and still are so many things to question surrounding this virus, but with time, we will begin to make sense of the thing that put our entire lives on pause. While grim circumstances have come from its presence, we are resilient, and there will be so many beneficial things as well. I have always believed people tend to create real solutions while in crisis. I cannot say what the end result will look like, but at the end of the day, I am grateful for this experience before having my own classroom. While I may not even know what my first day is going to look like in the fall, I am mentally preparing myself to be thrown many curve balls surrounding my expectations for how my career would begin, keeping in mind that wonderful things can come from unplanned situations.
