A Week In The Life Of Remote Teaching by Dr. Michael Flanagan
Original art by Pamela Michaels
The coronavirus pandemic, and its subsequent lockdown, has already cost nearly a hundred thousand lives and more than 38 million lost jobs in the U.S. alone. Teachers know we are lucky to still be working at this time. However that does not change the fact that the transition to online learning has been surreal, bordering on the absurd. It is not how children were meant to learn.
Yet billionaire education reformers--and their political puppets--are jumping at the chance to “reimagine” public schools and transition them into full time virtual classrooms. Simultaneously eliminating teacher salaries while profiting from technology and curriculum sales. Before people begin to buy into their self serving propaganda they should first have an idea of what A Week In The Life Of Remote Teaching is really like, from a teacher’s perspective.
MONDAY
Teachers wake with vim and vigor for the day ahead! Until we open our eyes and realize we will spend another day alone, in front of our laptops. Does it make sense that we miss our stressful, traffic filled commutes? We contemplate “accidentally” spilling coffee in our laps just for nostalgia’s sake. No amount of caffeine can prepare us for the barrage of emails written over the weekend. Commence typing.
Next comes the question of the day--synchronous or asynchronous? Shall we record and upload an asynchronous lesson using video, power points and websites, while talking only to ourselves? Or, should we go live with a synchronistic lesson on Zoom or Google Meets where we can interact in real time with our students? Only to realize that we are still pretty much--talking to ourselves.
What the pandemic has clearly shown is that online teaching is not true education, it is crisis management. Remote classrooms are really just teachers staring at computer screens arranged into those Brady Bunch style grid boxes with name tags where our students should be--a “Virtual Bunch”. Most students who do attend synchronous classes sign on and immediately disappear into the ether, playing video games and only half listening for their name to be called while muted.
TUESDAY
Or, as every day is now known, Groundhog’s Day. Each day just like the last. Recording classes, preparing lessons, switching accounts, changing platforms, teleconferencing and constant tech issues. Repeat ad infinitum.
It is uncanny how our internet service seems to know exactly when the worst possible time to cut out would be. Unerringly right before our class videoconference is supposed to start.
Five slogging Zoom lessons later, it is time for a virtual faculty meeting! Again the grid boxes, but most teachers leave their cameras on. We spend this time envying--or judging--our colleagues’ living rooms and decorations. Or watching their cats climb across their keyboards. Scrolling the names to see who is not muted--and causing the audio distortion--knowing they are about to get reprimanded. Before realizing that in fact it was our own audio that was unmuted, and everyone else knew it.
WEDNESDAY
It is on this day that we pine for our old classrooms. Fondly reminiscing about standing in the doorway during the change of periods--greeting our students--while the sound of screaming children reverberated through the halls. Missing the cacophony of noise that accompanied the transition to group work. And wondering how in God’s name it is possible to amass that much paper and garbage on the floor of a classroom in a single day?
It may have seemed frustrating then, but now we long for the time when students would arrive late to class claiming they were coming from the gym--even though we saw them in the room across the hall last period. Or hiding their cell phones in their book pretending to read the text. Or talking over us till we say “I’ll wait”, then saying “sorry mister” just before they begin talking again.
We have revisionist memories that 34 students packed into a stifling classroom right after recess wasn’t that bad. Sometimes remote teaching gets so unbearable that I pretend my cat walking into the kitchen is actually an informal “pop in” observation just to get an adrenaline rush. Developing??
THURSDAY
It is this day that the physical toll of remote teaching begins to set in. A teacher’s body was not designed to sit at a computer all day. We have trained to go without peeing for hours at a time, while continuously circulating through a tangle of desks, legs and book bags managing a class.
Teachers are now suffering from a condition I like to call Remote Teaching Syndrome (RTS). The symptoms include; Back spasms, blurry vision and finger cramps from sitting hunched over typing at a computer all day. The worst symptom though is the brain fog that arises from not physically moving all day but being exhausted nonetheless. Yet when we do try to sleep we either suffer insomnia or find that the light from our screens has permeated our subconscious, and we have fitful dreams of the matrix, which is our waking life.
FRIDAY
Occasionally on Friday’s after “work hours” one of our colleagues hosts a Zoom happy hour, where teachers finally get a chance to--once again--sit at our computers looking at the grid pattern and talking to virtual people. What better way to end the remote learning work week than having a few laughs with our fellow grid imprisoned colleagues?
It is during these cyber happy hours that we stare at each other on video--with its lagging audio and frozen screens--and ironically discuss how sick we are of sitting at our computers. Then we log off and grade into the wee hours of the night, and lesson plan throughout the weekend. To wake again on Monday with vim and vigor for the day ahead! Until...
Educators love teaching no matter what the circumstances. But we miss our students and our real classrooms, and can not wait to return to our old fashioned brick and mortar schools, where true teaching and learning takes place.
* This piece was not written from the perspective of students or parents--although I am a parent of a HS student coping with online learning. However, based on my informal research of the often frustrated and angry social media posts of parents and students, I will go out on a limb and hazard to guess their experiences with remote teaching have not been all rainbows and lollipops either.