A Million Small Conversations

Dr. Stone is a high school environmental science teacher in a suburban New Jersey town. He learned of COVID in early 2020 and began devoting a great deal of class time to helping his students track the spread of the virus.

We were using the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus tracker for the months leading up to lockdown. We were actually looking into it every day, trying to understand the causes of it.

He also took it upon himself to help students understand the origins of COVID and combat misinformation that was being rapidly spread on social media platforms.

One of the very last lessons we did in class [before lockdown] was basically using an article from the New York times that talked about the wildlife trade and the potential source of the coronavirus. Kids were bringing in their conspiracy theories or what they had seen on TikTok and things like that. And I was just kind of weaving that into each day so we could pay attention to what pseudoscience is versus science.

Unfortunately, it did not take long for COVID to reach their community. In March 2020, the school district implemented online instruction for two weeks, which soon became the remainder of the school year.

We were supposed to be home for the two weeks, then they extended it to the end of April, and then they extended it just to the end of the year. So, it wasn’t a complete “go home for the rest of the year,” but it didn’t take too long until it was.

Dr. Stone was instructed to post online assignments and hold daily office hours. However, he quickly observed that most students did not attempt to complete the work or take advantage of office hours for academic purposes.

Kids just vanished, and for different reasons. They were not just ignoring school, but kids were not coming to office hours. Some were coming to check in and say “Hi” and that’s about it. Some really needed a little bit of adult support, someone to talk to. But as far as the instruction, it became an opportunity to just really throw something out there and see what would come back.

The combination of various factors, including inability to participate in hands-on lessons, lack of synchronous online instruction, and limited student motivation resulted in a significantly higher course failure rate than usual.

I ended the year with 30% or 40% of students failing my class. The incredible lack of hands-on activity was one of the hard parts, and it was just really augmented by the fact that we were at a computer with no contact. . . . It really just amputated any kind of energy to do science.

The school district decided that students would be split into two groups for the 2020–21 school year: those opting to continue with online learning and those who wanted to return in person on alternating days. Although this approach allowed some students to return to the classroom, Dr. Stone lamented that the combination of high student absenteeism, safety protocols, and continued inability to do anything hands-on made it hard for anyone to be upbeat about the arrangement.

We had plastic dividers, we had to rearrange our desk so that there was all the maximum distancing. We had masks on, and there’s no hands-on activity because at that point, we’re still concerned about anyone touching anything. And so, it was still an incredibly sterile, really traumatizing way to teach. I’m still teaching through Zoom. I’m still teaching through Google classroom. It’s still digital. So there’s really no purpose in us being in each other’s presence. . . . I did some demo things here and there, but with something like environmental science, there isn’t much to do at a lab bench. So it was really just maybe even more draining. . . . It was just a drag every day.

District leaders soon recognized that students were struggling academically and decided it would be better to bring them back to school. However, even in person, most students were still finding it challenging to engage in learning.

Eventually, there were so many kids that were at risk of failing, they started mandating that kids come back to school. But kids were wearing their hoods up, they were wearing their masks, they were wearing their headphones. . .so there was no contact, no interaction with a lot of these kids.

In an attempt to increase engagement, Dr. Stone reintroduced the topic of COVID into his teaching in hopes that students might be interested in looking at COVID from a scientific perspective given its impact on all aspects of their lives. Dr. Stone weaved COVID into a discussion about the Tragedy of the Commons,¹⁰ with a particular emphasis on helping students see the importance of following safety protocols as a way to look out for one another.

I taught a seminar at a local university on the origin of coronavirus. So, I was able to use a lot of the content that I uncovered to use in that course to really focus on everything from the origin of the virus, from a wildlife perspective, and from a public health perspective, in terms of the Tragedy of the Commons. For instance, “How do we look out for each other? Why aren’t we looking out for each other?”

He noted that these discussions were impactful for students and provided a jumping off point for discussing other situations such as deforestation and wildlife trade.

It opened their eyes up to make connections between deforestation and wildlife harvesting. So like, “Oh wow. We keep interacting with so many different animals out there. Who knows what the animals have, and maybe we really should leave animals alone.”

In the 2021–22 school year, students and teachers returned to school completely in person. Dr. Stone indicated that students were generally happy to be returning to a sense of normalcy, and he was eager to teach in ways he had prior to the pandemic. However, he quickly realized that students were not prepared to learn at a usual pace after being online and at home for so long. As a result, he slowed down his pacing to accommodate students as they reacclimated to school.

I noticed that lessons were taking two and three days each. Just a standard 55-minute period. And all of my lessons were designed to be done in a half an hour just to allow that room for needing help or that some kids like to take things further. But lessons were taking forever and ever and ever. And so we didn’t get through enough stuff, and I had to cut out. I said, “We’re not going to have to be able to do this lab, we’re not going to do this lab.”

He also incorporated more paper-based assignments, such as science notebooks, to give students a break from using computers.

I was having kids do more stuff on paper, on the other hand, to get them away from their computers for their sake. I mean, kids who are growing up, not drawing and not writing in pencil, I felt like a serious lag. And so I was having kids use science notebooks and doing assignments where they had to draw things and graph things in colored pencils, just for more creative outlets.

Additionally, Dr. Stone promoted socialization by providing choices on assignments, giving students opportunities to choose places and topics that they could speak about. He realized that COVID had caused many students to miss out on life experiences they might have otherwise had, limiting their ability to meaningfully relate to some aspects of the course content.

I used student choice a lot. . . . I knew the kids had so few experiences that they had so little to talk about, which is really weird. I mean, I can’t imagine
having a year and a half of life that there’s nothing to talk about. So, I tried to change that up by giving them experiences to have.

Although COVID was exerting less daily influence, Dr. Stone continued to include it when covering Tragedy of the Commons because it had been so effective the previous year. He developed a second lesson focused on the shortages of items such as masks and hand sanitizer that had occurred during the pandemic.

They could see. . .why we ended up going through the shortages that we went through with toilet paper of all things. And people not realizing that there were meat shortages in the springtime. And so, by the time we got to the water unit, we were able to look at the rationing of water that’s been going on around the world. And the water unit became an issue of availability rather than pollution. So, the pandemic constantly fed into this idea of public community and things like that.

Through Tragedy of the Commons, Dr. Stone emphasized that public health practices only work if everyone does their part to help. This theme also provided an avenue for encouraging students to wear their masks properly if they wanted to contribute to slowing the spread of the virus.

Even if they don’t practice it, where it’s not their perspective, they gain the idea that some people do look out for each other, and that is a possibility to make things better. Sustainability works if everyone’s participating, if people are looking out for each other. . . . I would constantly stop to talk about, “This is why we still have to wear masks because everyone won’t wear masks. So, it’s constantly a tragedy of the commons.”

Reflecting on his time teaching during the pandemic, Dr. Stone noted that he took the role of providing accurate information about COVID seriously, both in his classroom and within his community more broadly. He took it upon himself to have “a million small conversations” at key points in time, hoping that these moments would lead to larger change, greater action, and an eventual end to the pandemic.

My seminar at the college was just winding down as the vaccines were rolling out, and we were paying attention to what it was going to take in this political climate and social climate to vaccinate as many people as possible. And [I ran across] the phrase “a million small conversations” or something like that. So I took it very much to heart saying, “Okay, if everyone who has an ounce of knowledge or an ounce of authority can be the person that has conversations with people to help them understand how the vaccines work and why it’s important to get them, I’m going to have as many of those conversations as possible.” . . . And of course, the cognitive dissonance is going to be there. I have kids that don’t think they can get sick. Kids think that the government puts microchips in [the vaccine] and all that stuff. So I was doing my best to be the face of public health, to help them understand on a daily basis how they could participate in ending the pandemic.

 

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¹⁰Tragedy of the Commons is referring to the concept of imbalance between self-interest and common good (e.g., overfishing for yourself while your community struggles with food shortages).