Don’t Ask Me to Teach Science But Only to Kids

Mr. Grayson will always remember where he was when he knew that COVID was going to have a dramatic impact on his school and science teaching.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine had a press conference on a Thursday afternoon. We had a science department meeting that same hour. So we were sitting in the science department meeting, and we had it on in the background. . . . We were talking about, “What are we doing next week? What’s our planning like? How’s this going?” But he’s talking about how bad this outbreak is . . . then at the end of his press conference, that’s when he was like, “Starting next week, no school, everything shut down.” So we quickly pivoted in the meeting from talking about next week what we we’re doing in class to how do we handle the next three weeks. Then my principal, who was a former biology teacher, looked at all of us and said, “Listen, we all know we’re not coming back this year.” And we were like, “Yeah, probably not.” Being honest, he’s like, “As science people, we probably know that, right?” So then we took a much wider view.

Although Mr. Grayson quickly understood the gravity of the situation, his sense of urgency wasn’t immediately shared by his district. He recalled an instance soon after the shutdown where he pushed back against a proposed in-person, district-wide professional development (PD) session. While his pushback was grounded in CDC recommendations related to social distancing, the situation put him at odds with district leaders.

While remote, our district decided to call an all-district, in-person PD. . . . After the governor just shut everything down. We’d been remote for three weeks, and we realized we weren’t coming back. So I sent a district-wide email like, “Here’s all the things from the CDC that says this is stupid. Please don’t do this.” I then ended up with a disciplinary hearing because I apparently wasn’t supposed to do that. . . . But I felt there were some misunderstandings, not just from the staff, but also from what are best practices here. . . . We have coworkers who live with immunocompromised people, who are themselves immunocompromised, or who take care of their elderly parents. There were some misunderstandings about what our responsibilities were. So I felt I had to advocate for us as humans. And the thing about it was, I recognize it was maybe a violation of chain of command and communication. Sure. . . . But I feel like best practices-wise, as a science teacher, don’t ask me to teach science but only to kids.

The struggles Mr. Grayson experienced during this time weren’t only related to school policies and practices but also to teaching itself. Online teaching eventually gave way to a hybrid approach where some students came in person on select days and others chose to stay online. However, both scenarios required him to come up with entirely new ways of engaging students with science content.

It totally removed so many of the things that I think we love about science. Like the ability to be hands-on, the ability to give a kid different modalities to experience and express themselves, as well as the ability to communally converse and interact at the same time with the same type of stuff and create joint understandings, not just through dialogue but through those demonstrations and those hands-on interactions. It wasn’t a pivot, it was a complete and total change.

As might be expected, these instructional changes required a significant amount of planning and preparation time.

I feel like that was probably my first year as a teacher again, from a level of having to reevaluate just about everything. . . . I started making screenshot tutorials. So I screenshotted every step for each lab, each digital lab and stuff like that. So it took a hell of a lot more prep time. It took a lot more time not just to evaluate what might be a problem, but to then address it or pre-address it, and then to also find ways to create new means of engagement.

Despite his many time commitments, Mr. Grayson took it upon himself to use his lunch and planning periods to distribute materials and supplies to his students’ homes.

My district is really small. We’re a little bit over a square mile. So I would be on a break, and I would just plan a route and just go drop stuff off.

He also devoted time to interacting with students who were isolated and eager for interaction. He explained that although teaching science was important to him, attending to student social and emotional health took precedence.

There were probably four or five kids who I don’t think actually interacted with another human, another student, the entire time during remote. So there were a lot of times I would sit on Google Meet just to talk. It would be lunchtime, and all the kids in-person have to go to lunch. And the kids online said, “We’re going to do lunch together here,” which meant I didn’t really get that full lunch. But I’m trying to be a body for them to have some type of interaction because otherwise they turn off their Chromebook, and they sit by themselves at their house. . . . I’ll catch them up on science, but I’m not going to be able to catch up to the fact that they haven’t talked to another child. So really, it required a lot more considerations for things than I would normally give, and it took a lot of energy, but it also paid off.

Mr. Grayson also noted that student isolation was coupled with a great deal of fear and uncertainty. This was especially true due to the high-poverty demographics of his school and prevalence of multi-generational households.

I work at a Title 1 school. 100 percent of my kids get free and reduced lunch, 99 percent are minority students. Probably I would say at least 80 percent of parents do not have anything beyond high school, and I would say probably around 50 percent don’t have a high school diploma. . . . I know a lot of parents did not get jobs that were remote, jobs that were able to support their family. So they really had multiple levels of stress with economics, with health risks, a lot of multigenerational households. A lot of our kids who were remote were remote not because they themselves had any health risk or their parents, it’s because they lived with three or four grandparents or uncles or something to that effect, and it was just not conducive for them to be going into an environment where there was any transmission risk. That created some, not just fear, but some real sense of vulnerability for these kids.

In an effort to alleviate student worries and influence positive student behaviors, Mr. Grayson addressed COVID in his science instruction. He was particularly diligent about answering their COVID-related questions, which ranged from virus mutations, to vaccines, to methods of transmission prevention.

There were a lot of questions about vaccines and stuff like that. . . . As kids this year were able to get the vaccine, it was like, “Well, what does it look like? How does it work?” Those questions came up more, so we would spend many lessons within our class time doing that, breaking that stuff down a little bit more. . . . I think there’s so much misinformation, especially for our kids where they don’t know how to fact check. They don’t know what’s right or wrong and they’re like, “Well, I saw it on TikTok.” . . . I’m not an immunologist. I don’t have any credentials on that, but I have enough scientific understanding to be able to help explain things and interest to learn it on my own as well. Then also to be able to communicate some effective practices for how this matters for our health. When we were remote, I ended every lesson like, “Make sure you cover your face with mask, wash your hands, and stay distant because whether or not you see it, it is real.” . . . There was a culture around here of like, “Well, I don’t care. I know somebody that got it. They’re all right,” or “I know somebody that said they were sick, and they weren’t even sick.” So there were a lot of asymptomatic cases, and there was a lot of people who were symptomatic but ultimately recovered. Then we also had a lot of death, and not a lot of kids were talking about the death. Part of it is it’s scary, but just trying to remind them, “I don’t want to scare you, but whether or not you see it, it’s real.”

He also used the pandemic to teach students about the nature of science, providing opportunities for them to examine data and look for trends. In this way, he helped students understand the tentativeness of science and growth in scientific knowledge over time.

We used [COVID] as the introduction to the scientific method, and we continually checked in with that as developments were being made. And people were able to see changes and growth in what we were learning through science, as well as what we could eliminate as incorrect or not as significant learnings or findings. So really, it gave probably the most effective scientific method introduction I could have ever imagined. . . . When we were doing scientific method and I’d be like, “Okay. So now we have this data for this, and we don’t have to wipe every bit of cardboard or let our mail sit outside for two days,” stuff that they were catching. My seventh graders actually really loved it. I thought it made sense to them. They, again, could see the growth of scientific knowledge versus science is this hard codified fact that you memorize and you learn and you recite.

As the world slowly emerges from the COVID pandemic, Mr. Grayson is contemplative about the numerous challenges for teachers, students, and schools that remain.

Every place was broken and fractured in some way. So we have to do a much more concentrated effort to address this. Obviously, no one of us can do that. It was a global issue and it still is.

He pointed to examples of student learning loss and large gaps in student knowledge of science content and practices that need to be filled.

There are some issues of kids not knowing how to use rulers, kids not knowing what an experiment really looks like, how to fill in a data table, how to make a graph, how to read a graph. So a lot of more fundamental science practices that I always incorporated and included. Before, it was always like, “This is our general two weeks of you getting to know the practices.” But now they had to be a month, and we really had to get deeper into the weeds with everything.

He also described readily apparent lags in student social and emotional skills and noted that teachers and schools generally are not equipped with the time and resources needed to help students recover these skills.

I think there are massive gaps in emotional development. . . . The middle school kids I have this year are nothing like the middle school kids I’ve had in the past. They’re more like the early fifth graders, the kids coming out of fourth grade into fifth grade just as far as how they interact with each other. They’re bigger, they’re smellier, and they cursed more, but they definitely have the same playfulness, the same level of dialogue with one another, the same touching each other’s stuff. It’s problematic because I want to address it, but we don’t have a school-wide program to address it. . . . So I’m not addressing their emotional needs appropriately. I know that. But I also don’t feel that we have the tools to do that right now as a district. I know professional learning communities across the world are struggling with this. I don’t know if anybody’s got it.

Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Grayson reflected on the toll the pandemic had on him as a science teacher, noting that financial obligations were the driving factor in his decision to remain in the profession.

I’m not going to lie, there were probably about $45,000 worth of reasons why I didn’t [leave the profession.] I took the teaching grant in undergrad, and I was like, “I really have to do one more year because I’ve made every fiscal plan along with this.” I mean, I love the profession, but that year took almost all my love.