I Believe That Knowledge is the Antidote for Fear

It was March 2020, and Ms. Brewington was excited about her sixth-grade science lab activity on plant transpiration. She had spent the previous evening visiting five different grocery stores in her southern Californian town to purchase enough celery for her students to participate in the lab and just gotten everything set up when an announcement was made over the intercom that school would be transitioning to online learning beginning on Monday.

It was March 13th, or Friday the 13th, and I remember having everything set up, ready to go, and then having to completely regroup that weekend and learn all sorts of new technology to be able to teach online the following Monday. So we went from hands-on learning to trying to transition that into Zoom lessons over a weekend.

Mrs. Brewington went home that weekend and set to work watching tutorial videos about how to use online learning management systems. She also began modifying her assignments to be computer accessible and creating videos of science demonstrations.

I mean, it was a sharp curve, but I managed to learn Zoom, Teams, and Google Classroom in a weekend with a lot of help from YouTube tutorials. I pretty much tried to modify what I was already going to be teaching. . . . I remember setting up a lot of demonstrations that the students would be doing on their own. And I would just make YouTube videos of me doing the science experiment, and they would watch and ask questions about it.

A few weeks into online teaching, Mrs. Brewington heard from the district that they would not be returning to in-person instruction for the remainder of the year. This news prompted her to find ways to make her remaining science lessons as hands-on as possible. Specifically, she modified a number of lab activities so students could perform them at home using everyday objects.

I did take some things that we were going to do as a class and try to find ways they could use household materials, so they didn’t have to go out and buy anything, to do some hands-on labs. They thought it was great. They were happy to do something hands on, because I don’t think in a lot of their other classes they did hands-on. . . . I knew how much the kids loved doing hands-on stuff while we were in person, and I didn’t want them to go the rest of the year without, so I came up with some things, and I searched online for a lot of ideas, too.

In addition to incorporating this hands-on approach to virtual instruction, Mrs. Brewington took advantage of their unit on the characteristics of living things to discuss viruses. She wanted her students to understand various terms related to COVID because she knew they were hearing them in their daily lives. Additionally, even though a COVID vaccine was not yet available, she wanted her students to have a scientific understanding of what vaccines are and how they work.

At the time, we didn’t have a vaccine yet, but as a student in a school, they’ve gotten a lot of other vaccines. So I knew one would inevitably be coming, and I wanted to preempt that with how it works. So I think they really appreciated it because I know it was kind of the elephant in the room. . . . I made sure I wasn’t “You should get a vaccine,” or “You shouldn’t get a vaccine.” I was just like, “Here is how it works. If you decide to get it, this is what you can expect.”

Ms. Brewington was able to help minimize student fear of COVID by openly discussing the topic and allowing students to ask questions.

I believe that knowledge is the antidote for fear, and I feel like I really opened up a lot of dialogue and, with a lot of questions and answers, hopefully I reduced some of their anxiety.

Additionally, once students began receiving the vaccine, Ms. Brewington was able to alleviate their fears by helping them better understand the negative side-effects they were experiencing. She used the situation as real-life example of how the immune system works to defend the body against invasion.

The students proudly came in and told me when they got a vaccine or described their symptoms to me to let me know their immune system was working. Because I think a lot of them were under the impression that the vaccine made them sick because they didn’t feel well and I was like, “No, it’s actually a really good sign that you have a healthy immune system and that your body is fighting to build a response.”

Students returned to campus for the 2021–22 school year. Because safety protocols were still in place to prevent COVID transmission, Ms. Brewington was not able to immediately go back to her pre-pandemic ways of teaching. However, she continued to find creative ways to provide students with opportunities to learn together in hands-on ways. Notably, she was able to secure a grant to purchase supplies so that students could have lessons outdoors.

I spent more time than normal getting them to collaborate in small groups and working in a lot of fun things as well. Not just doing labs from day one but playing games and trying to stay off the computer because they were just tired of it. . . . I applied for a grant to be able to take my students outside and have outdoor science classes. So they all got cushions and clipboards and some learning materials that they could do outdoors.

Ms. Brewington also found that even though the pandemic had been going on for nearly two years, her students were still very interested in talking about it. She continued to allow students to ask questions about COVID, noting that many of their questions centered around viruses and vaccines.

Their interest level was extremely high obviously because it’s very relevant and pertains to them personally. So I think it’s probably one of the most engaging topics of the year. They have so many amazing questions, “Why you need to get a new flu vaccine every year. Why sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.” So they understood if presented at the right time, after having all that background information about our immune system and how to contract a virus, how the virus replicates and things like that, it all makes sense to them.

As she reflected on teaching throughout the pandemic, Ms. Brewington was proud of her ability to explain complex science concepts to her students in a manner that they could understand.

I think it was Einstein who said, “You have to know something really well to make it as simply put as possible.” And I feel like I was able to do that really well with my sixth graders. I didn’t go over their heads at all with the information that I was giving them. I was giving them some pretty sophisticated information in an incredibly easy way to understand.