Matthew Lococo: Teaching in a pandemic
On March 14 at about 4 pm, my professional and personal life altered in ways that I would have never thought. On Friday, March 13, I told my students what I tell them every Friday, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do and enjoy your weekend, I’ll see you on Monday!” That all changed while I sat in a movie theatre watching the Jeremy Camp movie “I Still Believe” as my phone was exploding with colleagues and friends telling me the news, the Governor just closed schools.
Fast forward to June 2020, as a teacher with almost 15 years of experience I spend my summers training other teachers and working on curriculum maps. This year was no different I had a summer full of these opportunities the only difference was we had no idea what the school year was looking like. So we do what teachers do, plan for the best, and prepare for the worst.
When the governor announced Plan B, the real turmoil began. You see as a teacher I have to now prepare myself for four different eventualities. Each lesson has to be designed to be taught in person, at home online for a group that will come back the next week, completely online, and completely offline for our students doing remote learning without the internet.
In 15 years I have never seen the level of stress and frustration on the faces of my colleagues as I have seen this summer. Adding insult to injury is the noise, the voices on both sides of the argument that just won’t stop. We get it, this is not the best option for ANYBODY, not you, not us, not the district, but it is what it is. We have no choice, many of us, but to go back to work and figure it out. You have to remember teachers are parents and grandparents, they have families and are worried about a whole lot of stuff.
As the noise continues to grow the anxiety of teaching continues. There is no playbook for us and none of us were trained to teach like this. Most teachers in the classroom today were trained like I was to facilitate learning and allow students to discover information not to lecture and keep the students six feet apart. When you add the requirements in the amazingly confusing guidance from both the CDC and NCDHHS you understand the anxiety that almost all of us have. When you read the guidelines that we now have to figure out in a school with 600-700 students, in a rural district with limited manpower and limited resources you see the challenges created by people that have never spent a day in my or any other teacher’s shoes you understand our frustration.
No one agrees that distance learning we attempted to do last year worked, we all agree that the majority of our students are now starting this year behind and the measure invoked by our governor have made the task of catching them up even more challenging. Teachers are not the enemy when they say they are worried about their health and would prefer a soft reopening. While I disagree and advocate for a full reopening and return to normal, don’t shame people who are dedicating their very lives to teaching your kids.
I will close with this very simple statement I heard, “We need your grace.” That statement is very true of this year, just like the memes telling you not to yell at the lady telling you to put a mask on at Walmart, don’t yell at your kid’s teachers, the receptionist at the school, or even the administration. None of us asked for this and we are doing the very best that we can with what we have. We are going to make mistakes this year, we are going to have adjust things as we go, the old saying building the plane as you fly it, is very much what is happening.
Please, I implore, encourage the teachers, principals, superintendents, teacher assistants, bus drivers, cafeteria workers that are in your kid’s school. Show them grace, forgiveness, and understanding. If you think remote learning with your child was a challenge imagine trying to juggle teaching kids in front of you, kids that are “tracked out”, kids that are complete virtual, and then worrying about your own kids and what to do with them when they are “tracked out” or even worse completely virtual. It’s going to be a long school year but working together we can get through it. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work!
*** None of the comments above reflect the opinion or stance of Greene County Schools, its employees, administration, or school board. These are the opinions of the individual. ***
