Technology Turmoil

Ms. Keller is a high school biology and chemistry teacher at a large urban school district in Illinois. When COVID emerged in early 2020, her school made the decision to transition to online instruction for two weeks. However, two weeks eventually turned into the remainder of the school year and the first half of the subsequent (2020-21) school year. Because Ms. Keller’s school is not particularly affluent, many students did not have access to the technology needed for online instruction. As a result, student participation was severely impacted by the long process of distributing technology, working out technology logistics, and adapting to technology problems.

Most of the kids didn’t have technology or internet. Coming from a low income school, it just wasn’t something that was available. . . . So they gave them Chromebooks and data plans were given out for kids that needed them, because most kids didn’t have anything. And actually there was a learning curve there because we realized that the data plans were not infinite. Kids were running video and using the computer for their own personal use, which I totally understand, and they were running out of data two weeks into the month. And then they were like, “Well I can’t get on.” And at the beginning it was like, “Encourage your kids to turn the camera on but don’t ever force them or penalize them.” But then it went from that to, “We need to save their data so they can get on as much as possible. So if they’re running into that then don’t turn on their camera.” Plus connections weren’t always stable. So the technology piece did make it challenging.

In addition to computers and internet access, many of Ms. Keller’s students needed other supplies and resources to fully participate in schooling from home. Although funds were limited, her school did its best to provide students with these essentials.

We started doing a little bit of problem solving. Asking kids, “What do you need? You have a computer now, so what’s the next piece?” And there were different things that they needed to be able to participate. So the school started dropping that kind of stuff off at places if there was money to buy things. Sometimes there wasn’t money right in the beginning, and I know a donor chose to get noise canceling headphones. Because some kids are sitting in a house with three other kids. I’m talking to a kid and they unmute to ask a question and I can hear colleagues teaching siblings in the same room or somebody’s watching TV or whatever.

Ms. Keller also felt as though her school was very supportive of teachers during online instruction, doing what they could to help teachers perform their jobs effectively.

My school was very like, “What do you need? What can we help you with?” They did modify the schedule a little bit so we had a little bit more planning time to try to figure out how to do everything remotely. But again, they were still trying to figure it out too. . . . But my administration in general was very, “Tell us what you need. How can we help you? Do need a whiteboard in your house? Do you need this? Tell us how you can help.”

However, as the school regularly made changes to policies and procedures based on the needs of the school community, students received mixed messages about the expectations for attendance and work completion. Ms. Keller explained that it was difficult to set learning expectations that didn’t place unrealistic demands on students or have negative long-term consequences.

That initial two-week break turned into, “Well, your grades don’t matter. Everybody’s going to pass. It’s okay, it’s a pandemic. You don’t need to go to school.” Kind of a thing. So most kids didn’t go. . . . I’m not seeing any kids and it’s frustrating. And it was this push and pull of not wanting to penalize kids long term, in the sense of grades and GPA, for a global pandemic.

The lack of consistency and stability made it very difficult for some students to engage in school at all, and Ms. Keller became very concerned about student mental wellness.

There were kids we could just never get in touch with. I never saw them or they would log on but never engage. And there were kids, as the pandemic continued, you could see them disengage and stop coming all together. . . . Some of it was struggling with their mental health and being isolated. Other kids were like, “My parents are at work. I’m not getting out a computer.” And I get it. . . . But there were kids who would tell you that they were struggling. There were kids who wouldn’t tell you they were struggling, but it was obvious through their pulling away, that they were struggling.

The lengthy stent online also took its toll on Ms. Keller, and she struggled to find enjoyment and fulfillment in teaching during this time.

I hated it so much. I mean, when you’re used to being in a classroom with 20 high school kids, to go from that and being constantly busy and like, “Oh, I’ve got so much to do,” to being stuck behind a computer all day, that was really tough for me. . . . And so it was the constant conversation with colleagues like, “How do we make this not suck?”

Despite the many challenges of teaching online, Ms. Keller decided to address COVID in her science instruction. During the early days of the pandemic, she devoted time to answering student questions. She also did her best to help students understand the process of science and help them be critical consumers of information.

Kids always have questions about anything or they tell you about all the things that they know. And we kind of worked through some of that. At the very beginning there wasn’t a real lot to… You know what I’m saying? There wasn’t a real lot to tell them. They were asking and it’s just like, well we have to figure out what’s actually happening because there’s a lot of information that we don’t know. And then trying to like, “Well, I heard it was this. And I heard it was this.” And it’s like, “Okay, right.” But do we have any information to substantiate any of those random things that you were hearing or reading on the internet? So the beginning, it was a little hard because it was so unknown and everybody was extremely worried. And so it’s just trying to get them to understand the whole scientific process now needs to play out. We need to figure out what’s happening and all of this takes time. It doesn’t happen instantly. All this stuff you learn about in school, people have studied it for a while a lot of it. So we don’t have information. And that’s hard for, as a source of information generally for kids, that’s hard for them to hear I think too. Sometimes, “What do you mean? How does nobody know this?” And then they hear that corona viruses had existed. So they’re, “If they existed, then why is this a big deal?” So it’s a little bit of just trying to understand so much of what was going on.

However, as online school persisted into the 2020-21 school year, she addressed COVID less and less because the topic essentially saturated her students’ lives.

And at that point, the kids were a little COVID-ed out already. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It has dominated the news in my life.” And when you’re 14, that’s a long time. They’re like, “I’m over it. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It messed up my eighth grade year and all the fun social stuff that goes with that.” So they were kind of over it at that point.

When she and her students finally returned to school in-person during the spring of 2021, the transition was anything but seamless. Teachers and students struggled to reacclimate and catch up from nearly two years of disjointed, atypical schooling.

When they came back, instantly, you could see the result of being remote for a year and a half at that point. . . I was like, “Oh, this is going to be a tough reset back to being in person all day long.” because every single kid really needed a reset into what high school is like. How to use your locker. Where certain things are. Because nobody knew and they were all so unfamiliar. And at least from that point, it was a good selling point, “Nobody knows what’s happening right now. So we can all take comfort in the fact that we’re all on the same page here.” But it was this struggle with coming back and trying to give kids a little bit of grace and leeway to adjust to a new routine.

Students also continued to express COVID fatigue, pushing back against any mention of the pandemic during science instruction.

If COVID even comes up, kids are like, “I don’t even want to hear about that.” We were talking about protein synthesis in one of my classes and talking about mRNA and stuff like that. And at this the vaccine had been developed and everyone’s throwing around mRNA like they know what that is. And I’m like, “Well, we know about this. I’m doing it just for a relatable piece of knowledge.” But they’re like, “Oh, don’t talk about that vaccine. I don’t want to talk.” They’re done. They’re over it. They don’t want to deal with anything COVID related.

However, Ms. Keller remained optimistic that things would eventually return to normal.

I struggled because I felt like kids weren’t getting as much out of school, both socially and educationally as they normally do. But I was confident that that was going to be short lived. It was a little longer than I had hoped, but I was confident that eventually we would be back to normal.