Tiptoeing Around Politics

In early 2020, Mr. Pate began discussing COVID with his high school biology students. He and his students were tracking the virus as it was spreading across the US, predicting whether it would reach their small Idaho town, and if it did, when that would be.

In Idaho, we’re relatively isolated. I mean the population density is low. Things were heating up in other parts of the country, but nobody knew what was going on. And I remember we were talking about this in biology class. We talked about, “How bad is this? Is it going to get here? When is it going to get here in the event we got to the point?” We said, “Well, it’s going to get to Idaho. We’re not going to be isolated. Even though we think we are.”

It did not take long for COVID to spread to their school district, and during their spring break in early March, the decision was made to go into a soft closure. The plan was for students to continue the semester online at home while teachers had the option of working from the building.

We went on spring break, and they told us, “You’re not coming back into the school.” So it got here really quickly. And we went into what was called soft closure. Most teachers did not enter the building. I had a few colleagues who were there every day. I was there about half the time, but no students were in the school, and everything went online.

Mr. Pate struggled with the abrupt transition to online learning. He did not have access to a webcam to record videos of himself teaching or to hold Zoom check-in sessions. Instead, he assigned work through Google Classroom and used an online program that correlated with his textbook.

For the most part, [instruction] wasn’t via Zoom because I didn’t even have a camera on my computer or anything. It was mostly Google Classroom. . . . And at least for biology, I had an online program that went with the textbook, so I could have them do that.

He also discontinued formally including COVID in his instruction because of the rapidly changing information available at that time.

Once we went into the closure that first spring, I didn’t really talk about [COVID] in a formal manner. . . . I tried to keep students engaged and thinking about COVID but keeping it kind of light because no one really knew obviously what was actually unfolding.

As virtual learning progressed, Mr. Pate strove to provide his students with engaging lessons. He began assigning outdoor projects that provided students with a break from their computer screens.

I gave them a few outdoor projects, the kind of projects they could do out in their yard. Because the idea was that nobody was really going out in public and doing anything.

Later in the semester, he also prepared frog dissection materials for students who wanted to perform a lab activity at home.

A certain time of the year, we usually do frog dissections. I put out there for students, “If you want to do this at home, it’s totally optional. Come by, pick up the materials, and you can do it at home. I’ll send out instructions and materials.”

The 2020–21 school year began with students choosing to be in one of two groups: online or in person. The online students attended lessons and submitted assignments virtually, while the in-person students were split up and rotated days in school throughout the week. To attempt to keep everyone safe from COVID, social distancing rules were enforced, plastic shields were installed, and teachers had to sanitize desks between classes.

Students were able to opt in or opt out whether they wanted to be in person or online. And so we had this online component, and then we had the in-person component, and that changed throughout the year. If I remember correctly, it was only half the students were there at a time. . . . Social distancing was still big. You had these little plastic shields between me and the student. I was wiping down the tables with different cleaning materials between each class.

Mr. Pate noted that the amount of preparation that this new schedule created for teachers was demanding because it required every lesson to be digitized and accompanied with instructions. Even though the district provided teachers with Wednesdays for lesson planning, the time and detail this schedule required was a heavy burden on teachers.

I think what dragged a lot of people down was the amount of online material we had to prepare for the students. That’s what our Wednesdays were supposed to be for. And it took an incredible amount of time. But the amount of material you had to prepare online for every single assignment, it took so much time to prepare it because it was all in writing. So you had to sit there and write out every single detail about how to do the assignment, how to submit it, what the expectations were. I mean really lengthy. The instructions are usually much longer than the assignment.

He indicated that students were also struggling at this time. Many were finding it difficult to manage online learning and the feelings of isolation that resulted from being at home alone. As a result, the district allowed students to transition to in-person instruction at the beginning of the second semester.

Then, at semester, students were allowed to make the decision to opt in or opt out. So when we switched the next semester. . . . The number of students online went way down. Because there were a bunch of students . . . who were realizing this is not working. They’re not learning a whole lot. I think they felt isolated. So they came back to school, . . . [and] we went to full size classrooms.

Despite the challenges that the school year presented, Mr. Pate reintroduced COVID into his biology instruction. He explained that he attempted to avoid political debates by incorporating the topic into informal discussions and into topics he was already covering, such as virulence.

We did talk about COVID. Again, we sort of did it informally, and, of course, many parts of the country had started getting very politicized. . . . I still used my labs with disease. I do sickle cell for the genetics, can talk about Ebola, talking about virulence. So, we talked about the virulence of COVID and how it seems to be changing over time, how it’s spreading.

Yet this informal and nonsystematic approach seemed to pay off. For example, while completing an infectious-disease-spread lab, Mr. Pate noticed that his students were suggesting COVID safety protocols, like social distancing, as ways to prevent themselves from getting “sick.”

I do a lab which is a hands-on lab with the spread of infectious disease. I could see a lot more students doing strategies. “Let’s quarantine, let’s do the distancing.” So that was more there. And I think that was from their experience of what they were going through with COVID, et cetera. I think with that lab, makes them think about it, about the spread of disease much more.

In the 2021–22 school year, all students returned to campus full time. Mr. Pate and his colleagues were eager for things to return to the pre-COVID conditions but quickly realized that students were not prepared for the high level of expectations regarding their work or due dates. He reflected on how this mismatch between teacher expectations and student capabilities created quite a bit of tension.

I think teachers were trying to get the expectations back up to where they were, but what the students were willing to do was much lower. You have to meet them somewhere, but they just seemed overwhelmed by any kind of work you expected them to do. And almost like an attitude, “That doesn’t matter if I do that or not, I can always do it later. I can do it online. I can do an alternative version.”. . . And it’s kind of this conflict between student and teacher happening.

Despite the new challenges presented by the shift back to in-person instruction, Mr. Pate found ways to continue to weave COVID into his science instruction. In particular, he used it as a way to discuss the nature of science with students as they reflected on how their perceptions changed as more information was discovered about the virus. Mr. Pate also emphasized that it was not that scientists were wrong about COVID; there was just more that had not yet been discovered.

Sometimes talking about how the information changed as we went through the pandemic. And sometimes we would say, “Hey, remember when . . .” And we’d talk about that. What the ideas were on COVID. . . . During this last year, we started talking about how the perceptions change and really, I think students kind of get this, is that’s not that scientists are wrong. It’s that as we get new data, we change our models, and we change our approach.

Mr. Pate indicated that he hoped discussing the nature of science in relation to COVID would help students recognize that they are living in a time in which science is at the forefront of their lives.

Some students struggle because they think, “Well [science] is just memorizing a bunch of facts,” and that’s not what science is at all. . . . I think COVID from a science perspective is powerful because it’s changing so fast, and they’re living through the effects of it. Like really, it’s right there in front of them.

However, reflecting on his teaching during the pandemic, Mr. Pate wishes he had not succumbed to fears of the repercussions of discussing COVID. Although he did include COVID in his instruction, he wishes he had done more.

Well, looking back, and I think I would probably do more. . . . I mean, unfortunately, things got very political. So I think there’s a tendency to sort of back off and not talk about what could be taken as political ideas too directly. We were kind of told that we don’t want any kind of shaming going on, mask versus non mask, this attitude versus that attitude. But I think I would definitely incorporate a lot more of the . . . spread of disease into the curriculum.