Challenges With Distance Learning

“Arg!  Stupid internet!” I complained aloud to the computer.  The search I was running for a picture to include in my Google Doc for my lesson on Monday timed out and the no-connection dinosaur jeered at me.  It’s impossible to conduct distance learning when the internet is out.  I cannot do the work that I’m paid to do and it’s frustrating to be interrupted in my work flow.  It’s like someone turning off the lights suddenly when you’re reading in bed.  The only thing to do when the internet goes out is to step away from the computer (so I don’t throw it out of the window) and leave the room.  This is why I never brought my work home.   The internet connection at school is always rock-solid, never unexpectedly shutting off, interrupting the hard-at-work vibes.

Sitting at my little desk crowed with computer and textbooks, away from my family members with the door closed, I create lesson plans, Zoom with my students, Zoom with other teachers, check email, write emails, record my voice giving feedback to students, and stare at the screen brow furrowed when the internet goes out.  I’ve never sat so much in my life and the strange thing is that by the end of my 3-5 hours working I’m exhausted.  I’m more exhausted than when I was in the classroom, giving direct instruction and roaming the classroom, interacting with my classes of 25 or more students.  I would stand most of the 7 hours during the school day.  Now, my eyes are tired from looking at the screen and my bottom feels like it’s glued to the seat despite the couple of old pillows I added to sit on.  My brain is infiltrated with a dense fog and I simply cannot think any more by the end of my work day.

I can tell how a student is doing that day in the classroom the moment they walk in my door.  Their body language and facial features give a story to me, describing what the day has been like for them, without telling me a word.  In this new digital learning world, I can’t do that, and aside from Zoom, where we cannot make eye contact with each other, I don’t see their faces.  Interaction in digital learning is very much one sided.  I post lessons but I am not in the classroom and cannot read facial expressions or body language to sense how well my students are understanding the lesson.   I sent out all sorts of content out in the digital world:  emails, comments, videos, and audio recordings.  It’s all one-sided, like I’m sitting at a lake-side fishing and casting out my line multiple times, but only catching one or two fish.

About 20% of my students are participating in distance learning and in one of my classes that has all seniors, none of them are participating.  It’s hard to not take this personal and wonder if I’m doing something wrong.  On good days I do the best that I can to create lessons that are rigorous and make for good learning activities, remembering that’s what I’m being paid for and that I’m doing my part.  On the bad days, brain numb from staring at the computer, I mourn for my students and feel that I’m not doing right by them.  The daily interaction between teacher and student that made it all worthwhile.  I learning early in my teaching career that the content was only about 10% of the job and the other 90% is relationship building.  Here in the distance learning world it’s flipped around, 90% is the content and 10% relationship building, but it feels that the relationship portion is even smaller.

We only have three more weeks of distance learning to complete in my school district.  After that comes the summer and hopefully by the fall we’ll be back in the classroom, although our governor has said that we might not.  We could have some sort of combination of distance learning and classroom learning.  But that’s too far ahead for me to consider right now.  Right now I am focusing on these last three weeks of this crazy 2019-2020 school year and trying to finish well, doing the best I can, with the internet I have.

Learning to Swim With Distance Learning

I’ve been a classroom teacher for 14 years and a distance learning teacher for 5 weeks.  Like almost everyone in the education field, I found myself tossed into distance learning unexpectedly, like a kid being tossed into the swimming pool and being told to swim.  I floundered and splashed, choking on the water, and at times I was certain that I was going to drown.  But, after the panic of that first plunge was over, I remembered that at least I knew how to tread water, and began to move my arms and legs just enough to keep myself afloat.

I was content with just keeping my head above the water and I was resistant to taking any strokes.  The participation of my students in the first couple of weeks was a fraction of those I had in my classes.  My classroom held anywhere from 25-35 students and 95% of them participated in my lessons.  In this new distance learning world, I had only 10% participation, and in some classes less than that.  I railed against learning to swim.  Why should I learn more about distance learning and put all this effort into my lessons when there was such a low participation rate?  The students aren’t even receiving a grade on their work. The time involved didn’t seem as though it was worth the effort on my part.

I grieved the loss of my physical classroom and missed my students terribly, never realizing that the daily interaction with my students was one of the components of my job that made it worth while to go to work.  I was resistant to this pedagogical change and did bare minimum in my virtual classroom on Google, mourning the loss of face-to-face instruction.  I knew many strategies on how to manage a physical classroom of 30 students but I knew next to nothing about managing a Google Classroom.  I clung to what I knew.

During a department meeting, using Zoom, something I never heard of two months ago, one of my fellow teachers said something that resonated with me.  “This is an exciting time, I’m not frustrated.  This is a time I can try new things out, the kids aren’t being graded on it.”  It was a breath of optimistic fresh air.  He was right, the kids aren’t being graded on anything, now is the perfect time to try out new things and maybe learn something myself.  We won’t be using this distance learning model forever, and even if we continue to use some aspect of it, now’s the best time to learn about it.

I took my own advice that I give to my students: learn by doing.  Another colleague shared that Google has an online learning platform for teachers to learn how to use their apps to teach.  I found it and learned more about what Google Classroom, Google Docs, Google Forms, and Google Slides can do.  I saw our teacher’s union recommended various webinars that the state department of education was putting on.  I found one about how to record video of yourself giving a lesson and watched it.  An Amazon search produced a book “Teaching Math with Google Apps: 50 G Suite Activities,” I read it and learned about Google Drawings, how to insert math equations into slides and forms, and how to record my voice using a free website.  I even learned about Bitmoji and created an avatar of myself to insert in emails to my students.

I am finally taking strokes in the pool and not just treading water.  They aren’t powerful strokes, but I have an idea of where I’m going.  I’m trying some of the various activities I read about in “Teaching Math with Google Apps” and I’m learning what works well and what doesn’t.  I’m recording myself teach using Zoom and ordered an XP-Pen to make it easier to write digitally.  I’m holding virtual office hours, rigging my own document camera using my cellphone and a stack of books as a stand with one heavy book on top of the cellphone to keep it in place as it looks down on the pad of paper.  My teacher’s heart is happy when some of my students pop in and I get to see them and help them with math.