Starting Over

Ms. Goodall was a high school physics teacher in an affluent, suburban Illinois high school when the COVID pandemic forced schools all across the country to shift to online instruction. Ms. Goodall’s school discouraged teachers from discussing COVID as part of their regular instruction. Therefore, she focused on keeping instruction as “normal” as possible for her students, continuing to cover planned content and seeking out means of providing interactive experiences.

A few students thanked me for being the only teacher still actually doing work. I tried to keep it as normal as possible in terms of what I would do in physics.

For example, for the topic of electricity, she added several online simulations, some that she had used in the past and others that she sought out online or via colleagues.

I mostly just had my kids working on digital and virtual simulations for physics. We were in our electricity unit at the time at the end of the year. We stretched out the electricity unit a little bit. The University of Colorado PhET has really nice simulations. I had already used those, so I already had labs that I could do for electricity. We just did all those, and a couple of my colleagues had made other ones for switches, and we found a few other websites and used those.

Because Ms. Goodall’s school had an abundance of financial resources, she was able to purchase Pivot Interactive, a website with interactive science simulations that students could use at home. For her light and sound unit, Ms. Goodall explained that the website provided opportunities for her students to manipulate and change relevant pieces of interactive, filmed science simulations, an activity that helped them stay engaged and learn content while online.

For sound waves and light waves, I had my school, being quite affluent, purchase Pivot Interactive, which has a lot of science labs where students could click buttons and make selections and actually make changes on their boards. My students were able to do some labs that way and still learn a really good chunk of physics content.

Ms. Goodall was also able to use school funds to sign up for Go Formative, live whiteboard software that allowed her to observe students working through problems in real-time and chat or comment on their work. She noted that this software provided another means of interaction between her and her students and provided her with real-time feedback about what students were understanding and what they were struggling with. The ability to see students working in real time also provided evidence of student participation and engagement.

I used Go Formative, which is kind of a white board virtual lab app. I could assign a problem, and I could see everyone working through it in real time, and I could comment on it in real time, and I could send them chat messages and Zoom in real time. It at least got them doing a little bit of physics, and then I felt comfortable giving them credit for today’s work, and everybody got an A that showed up.

Although Ms. Goodall was able to find ways to keep teaching physics, she quickly realized that her students needed more than content. It was clear from Zoom interactions that many students were struggling because of the significant challenges they were facing in their home lives. Further, Ms. Goodall recognized that student struggles were often tied to socio-economic status.

I think the most difficult part was those kids who were not well off were stuck at home because they’re living with mom and grandma. Or if they’re homeless. In a school of 6,000 kids, when most people are pretty affluent but there’s one or two per class who aren’t, that becomes starkly real. When you can see in their background that their home life is very different than your home life.

Although she longed to help, Ms. Goodall did not feel prepared to deal with the social and emotional well-being of her students. However, she did her best to support them through some of the lowest times in their lives.

I was not being prepared for that social, emotional well-being of my students, because we didn’t know what each person was doing at home. We didn’t know what was going on in their life. And they only open up so much at the age of 16 and 17. The ones that did open up, I would sit on Zoom for hours with them if they needed to talk. But I could only do so much too from my own house. I have to start my next class. Having to hang up on a kid occasionally to start a class, “I’m sorry, I have to go, but please call guidance. Call this number.” Calling their parents later to just say, “Hey, check in with them.” That was rough.

The beginning of the 2020–21 school year brought the birth of Ms. Goodall’s third child, so she was away from teaching until November. Her school hired a long-term substitute teacher that was fully remote with students until her return. In planning for her maternity leave, Ms. Goodall once again drew on the readily available school funds to put together supply kits that were sent to students at the beginning of the year.

We had spent all summer planning, and I had come up with a bunch of really good hands-on labs that the kids could do with equipment we bought on Amazon. Per class, each teacher had enough money to buy whatever we needed. I sent home bouncy balls, rulers, springs. I bought $300 worth of stuff per class. Each kid essentially got a bag with physics equipment so they could do real physics. We were able to use a bouncy ball. We had five or six different marbles. We had a couple of different rulers that had tracks built in. Having all that money available to us, we were able to buy and essentially write our own at home physics labs. We sent home a ton of stuff, so my sub had all that equipment to work with, to use some of it while I was on leave.

Soon after her return, her school made the decision to transition to hybrid instruction where small groups of students attended school in person on alternating days. Although Ms. Goodall was once again able to see students in person, she felt that student motivation was lacking. In particular, students who were in person during the school day were not engaging with content because they were essentially doing the exact same activities in the exact same ways as those who were online.

Half my students were in the classroom, half were at home. I would check in with my Zoom kiddos. They would be doing the online version of the labs that we had set up with the at-home equipment. The kids in person would be bringing in their at-home equipment and using the same stuff in person, but they were allowed to work in groups of two if they felt comfortable and wore masks. There were a couple of activities and demos that I would have the kids in person show to the kids at home. I tried to incorporate the in class and at home kids together. But we were mostly instructed that you were not allowed to do separate things for the kids at home and the kids in person. . . . I essentially taught the class like they weren’t there, which is what we were required to do.

The return to in-person instruction also caused Ms. Goodall to experience extreme anxiety and depression, as she was constantly worried about bringing the virus home to her young children.

Our school tested everyone all the time, so, in theory, I should have felt safe. But I did not. I had a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression. From November to December is a blur if I’m being honest. I just had a baby. I could never go to the doctor with COVID, they never let you in. In January, I got put on antidepressants for postpartum anxiety and depression, which was probably triggered by COVID and all of that stress added in.

Looking for a new start, Ms. Goodall began the 2021–22 school year at an urban high school in Milwaukee. Although she was in a new building with new students, she soon recognized that these students struggled in many of the same ways as her previous students. These struggles were especially apparent as students returned to the classroom full time.

There were more kids needing mental health support than I’ve ever seen before. . . . Students who were more introverted, you could tell were really struggling with those social skills they hadn’t needed to use in two years. These students had COVID in eighth grade, ninth grade, sophomore year. And so, now they’re juniors with no social skills, so that was hard this year.

However, despite some social emotional challenges, Ms. Goodall found that her students were interested in the physics content she was covering, most likely due to the excitement over experiencing hands-on instruction again.

I will say it seemed like the kids appreciated physics more, the hands-on stuff. I took away a lot of the virtual stuff that I had done previously before COVID because I’m like, “Nope, we needed to do everything hands on. I have equipment.” Now, the computers analyze some of the data for us, but I made them make graphs by hand. I made them find the slope by hand. Then, I showed them how to use their calculator for it. Some of those skills that they just didn’t need during COVID, I’m like, “Nope, we’re going to take data by hand just to make sure you guys kind of get back in this groove of what science is.”

The supportive environment in Ms. Goodall’s new school also gave her the confidence to address COVID in her instruction. Even though her curriculum was not directly related to COVID topics, she decided to address any student questions and talk through some of the data they were interested in.

When the vaccines came out, when the boosters came out, the kids had questions, and I felt comfortable just having class discussions about that. When a kid would say something like, “Oh, COVID’s not real,” or “The vaccine’s going to make you sick.” I’d be like, “Listen guys, when the medical community can get together and work together on something, amazing things have happened. You got opportunity to see that here.” I only do it with data. I won’t do it unless I have data that they can analyze because I feel like that’s my in as a physics teacher. . . . Our school got air purifier things, so I had no problem pulling up those air purifier things webpage and be like, “Let’s look at what they’re saying their particle filter’s doing here.” This
is physics. Air movement is physics. It’s not the physics we do, but it relates to speed and momentum and energy transfer.

After two years of frustration and stress, Ms. Goodall was thankful for a a new start and return to some measure of normalcy. However, reflecting on her experience during the pandemic, Ms. Goodall now recognizes that the tribulations she went through did help her grow and improve as a teacher.

I got to rewrite everything. I think that’s always a good thing for anyone. I redid everything, my notes, everything, literally everything from scratch, new Google Classroom, new slides, everything from scratch instead of reusing some of my old stuff. I feel like that helps. It makes it a little more personal year by year. As a middle-aged teacher who’s been teaching now for 16 years, some of my stuff gets dated. Everything’s now been made virtually. All of these students who had mental health stuff, I was like, “Here you go. Here’s all of this unit virtually.” I have a calendar. It’s very organized. It has reading links, movie links, choose your own adventure. How do you want to learn? Here’s a video of me lecturing three years ago. I still have all of that content for kids who are out, so that’s nice.