Lessons Learned - Reflecting on Covid Teaching 5 Years Later - Part 2

Last week, I spent some time remembering the events of five years ago.  I focused on how hard it was.  And it so was.  I have no perfect analogy, but this one seems to work.

For the teachers who were already in the classroom when the pandemic started, our entire careers, we have taught on a boat.  Boats aren't always smooth or stable, but you get your sea legs by managing all the ups and downs, knowing that there is something solid under your feet and that the boat is moving forward.  COVID threw all of us and the kids off the boat and into the water, so we did what you do in that situation; we tread water to survive.  In the beginning, everything looks okay because everyone's head is above water and everyone is still kicking.  Even though no one is moving forward, everyone is surviving and hoping to get back on the boat.  There's only so long people can tread water before their arms give out.  We helped each other and the students tread longer by using whatever energy we had to hold up the others.  All we really wanted was to get back on the boat, and we finally did.  The boat feels different now than it did, but at least we are back on it.  We also learned some things from the treading experience that made us stronger.  That's what this week's post is about.

1. Virtual is not a replacement for in person

Prior to Covid, there was a lot of talk about the "direction education was headed" (My Lord, how I loathe that phrase), and a lot of attention had been given to online classes, video classes, and asynchronous learning.  The pandemic taught us that the in-person stuff matters when it comes to teaching and learning.  Body language, the ability to read a room, having the teacher standing up as the person to pay attention to.  All of it matters so much more than we ever knew.  A video cannot check for understanding and respond to it (and no AI cannot either).  It is difficult on a Zoom call to tell if students are confused and impossible to help only one of them when they need it.  But at a more fundamental level, learning is a social experience.  It has been since the Garden of Eden when God came down and walked with Adam to teach him.  God could have drop knowledge directly into Adam's brain, but He did not.

I mentioned last week that I was living alone through all of this.  My wonderful friends set up virtual lunches and times for us to chat.  I'm grateful that they did, but it was still not a replacement for sitting in a room with them.  When we got back to that, it was like a weight had been lifted.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't take advantage of existing technologies to meet our academic objectives.  I'm saying that we should never undervalue the impact of a teacher who knows something explaining it to a student who doesn't in a classroom.  

2. Split attention is exhausting and poor educational strategy

Hybrid teaching was, without question, the hardest thing I've ever done for so long.  (It was not the worst year I ever had because hard is different from bad.)  My own working memory was taxed from the beginning.  Using the technology that allowed us to teach this way required multi-step setups, and we had to add masks and spacing to things we needed to look out for.

But by far, the most exhausting part was trying to make sure the kids online were just as involved as the kids in the room.  They weren't just there to watch; they were still my students. That meant a lot of pre-planning to make sure they had whatever they needed to have at home, but it also meant checking in with them just as frequently as I did with the kids in the room.  It meant stopping to ask them questions (and sometimes just to make sure they were still there - so many had left the room).  It was like trying to be in two places at once, and used every ounce of energy.  

If it were simply exhausting, we could have handled that.  Teachers are generally tired from September until May.  The bigger problem was that no matter how hard we worked, we couldn't make it better as an educational strategy.  Giving only part of your attention to the kids in front of you isn't good for them; giving part of your attention to the kids online isn't good for them.  As a science teacher, it was nearly impossible to involve the virtual students in lab experiences and hands on activities (Our AP Chemistry teacher actually ran a separate time after school when the virtual students could come in and do labs on their own).  

Please note:  I am not saying we should not have done this during the pandemic.  It was the right way to handle things in the context of our situation.  We do things in emergencies that we wouldn't do at other times.  Hybrid learning mitigated the loss that would have been so much worse if we had not done it, but it is not something we should ever do outside of an emergency situation.

3. Building in time for community matters

GRACE's mission statement begins with "GRACE Christian School is a loving community."  This is never more evident than when there is a crisis.  If there is anything we did well, it was rally around hurting people.  The pandemic required creativity to make that work.  Since there were no social events or clubs, and we couldn't even put people in the same room for chapel, we needed to have a way to keep the community strong.  Chapel was done during part of their Bible classes, leaving a space in the schedule.  We divided the kids into smaller groups, called Community Building Groups.  It was time to breathe and play. We had games and contests. Since we couldn't have fans at games, one week, our community building groups made cardboard cutout fans which were then put into the bleachers for basketball.  If I had balloons or paper airplanes from science classes, I kept them for community building time.  One of my community building students was virtual, so I mailed the paper airplanes to him and then he went outside at the same time we did (taking him with us via iPad), and when we played charades, he provided the words to me in the chat.

While they have changed the way it works several times since, there has been a continued effort to have community building groups. All victories are sweeter and all tragedies impacts are lightened when experienced with support.  That has always been true but was never more evident than it was during the hybrid year.

4. The team is truly critical

So, I knew already that I worked with best team of people in the history of the world.  But, during the lockdown, the hybrid year, and the year that was supposed to be better (but wasn't), I had more opportunities to witness this than ever before.  I'll start with my admin.  As I mentioned last week, our administration was filled with forward thinking planners.  That was true in preparing for the lockdown and for the return, but it was also true in their care for us.  They seemed to know just when we were going to need something special or a word of encouragement.  One day, we got an email that declared the next Friday would be "a snow day" just because our head of school thought we might need one. They stayed late at night, after receiving notice of a diagnosis, to measure six feet around that person's seat in each class so they could inform those people of exposure. Then, they showed up the next morning to lead devotions and help with duties.  Teachers held each other up. You would be having a very rough day, and a colleague whose plate was already overflowing would offer to take your lunch duty that day.  The math teacher across the hall from me would come to find other teachers to tell them that she heard a student say a nice thing about them.  

Without the team I had around me, I would have been a broken person at the end of the year.  Build your team in the good times so that trust base is already there in rough times.

5. Growth happens under stress

As hard as it was, I became a better teacher during Covid.  Changing circumstances required me to pay attention to details I might not have before. 

• Moving our tests from paper to online platforms (and back again the following year - I could not stand having them continue to take them on a computer) forced me to read each question and evaluate it.
• Trying to explain things virtually is very different from explaining them in person.  You don't have body language, nuanced facial expressions, and physical proximity (and weird things like jumping up on a chair to discuss the movement of electrons between energy levels) to aid your words.  That meant my words had to become better. I had to find better explanations and analogies.
• The resources I created to send to my virtual students were helpful to have after the pandemic was over.  We all know that the absenteeism has become an issue.  While that hasn't hit GRACE as hard as it did in public schools, it still hit us.  Having resources to email to a student who was about to be out for three days saved me a lot of reteaching upon their return.

I sincerely hope that we never go through anything like Covid again, but allow me to return to the boat analogy.  After a year of treading water, we may not have moved forward, but my arms were stronger than ever.  When we all got back into the classroom, the lessons we learned made us stronger and more equipped to face the normal challenges of teaching.

The Day the World Stopped - Reflecting on Covid Teaching 5 Years Later - Part 1

The first time I heard the suggestion of closing school was from a senior in my video editing class.  It was mid-February.  "Miss Hawks, do you think they'll close schools because of this virus?"  My response was remarkably short sighted - "No, we don't close schools.  How would that even happen."  

A few days later, in a faculty meeting, my head of school said, "On Wednesday, we are going to have a 'just in case' meeting. We need to figure out what we will do in the event that we have to switch to remote learning for a few weeks. So come to this meeting with thoughts about what you would need to take home and what the kids would need to have at home."  Little did I know that the administration and the IT department had been talking about this for several days, deciding whether we would use Zoom or Google Meet and how to load everyone's class schedules in the calendar so all the student had to do was click on the link.  

Two and a half weeks after that "just in case" meeting, I was in a "this is happening soon, but we don't know how soon" meeting. It turned out soon was the following day.  Our very forward thinking administration filled with aggressive planners were shown to be wise indeed.  March 13, 2020 is the day the world stopped. It was the day we got the email that we would be going into a virtual learning environment immediately.  And, of course in the next few days, everything else started shutting down as well.

As massive life transitions go, I have to say this one went pretty smoothly - for us at GRACE.  Because they had been thinking about it already, the IT department started loading in class schedules immediately.  Teachers were allowed to come to the building for planning for two days and could do their virtual teaching from their classroom if they wished for the rest of that week.  I opted for this because I wanted to be near the IT department if I ran into any issues and wasn't sure if the wifi I had at home was robust enough.  After all, I hadn't chosen it with large amounts of streaming data in mind.  More importantly,  I knew it would be the last time I would see people for a month (it turned out to be much longer than that, but at the time, we had planned for a return after Easter break, four weeks later) because I live alone. I knew that was going to be hard for me, so I stayed at the school building for as long as they allowed.

So, we only lost two instructional days before teaching our first virtual classes on March 17, 2020.  As four weeks became six and six became the remainder of the semester, we checked in with each other every day to make sure things were going as well as they could, for emotional connection, and for prayer with each other.  Students were remarkably adaptable and helpful.  Parents sent me notes and emails of support (some even invited me to their homes for dinner because their child was worried about my being alone - which kind of misunderstood the point of what we were doing but was still very kind).

Being a single person who lives alone during this time was rough.  My parents came over once a week, which was likely a violation, but I would have been useless to everyone if I had lost my marbles from isolation.  We didn't touch each other at all. They just came over on Sundays and had lunch.  I had no physical touch from another human being for 10 weeks.  I don't know all the complexities of oxytocin, but I do know that having none of it did some screwy things to my brain that took a couple of years to recover from.  One evening, about 5 weeks in, I was watching TV and looked down at my hands to find that my right hand was patting my left hand.  I don't know how long it had been happening or if it was even the first time I had done that, but my body knew it needed something it wasn't getting.

Like all schools, we our administration had to plan for end-of-year activities, like giving kids things from their lockers, collecting textbooks and athletic uniforms, and handing out yearbooks.  Our graduation was perhaps the best in America.  I wrote about it here if you would like to read about it.

The summer was hardly one of rest, although as teachers, we got more rest than our poor administrators because they had to do all of the planning for the return.  We had multiple online meetings, not only about how to deal with spacing but also about racial reconciliation in the wake of George Floyd.  We made plans for how to teach in a way that would be equitable for those who would choose to stay home and those in front of us.  It was hard to know what the correct decisions were as there was no experience on which we could rely to show us the way.  My most common sentence as we returned was, "We're going to try this.  If it works, we'll keep doing it. If not, we'll try something else."

I can't write much about the hybrid year.  I'm still a little too overwhelmed by how hard it was to properly convey it.  It's kind of a "you had to be there to understand" situation.  We were working at 100% of our capacity every single day, and then there were days that required more, so we were living in an energy deficit.  I was so grateful to be back at school because I couldn't have handled any more alone time, but it was still exhausting to face spacing, cleaning, masks, temperature scanners, plexiglass, and uncertainty every single day in addition to the normal challenges of teaching middle and high school.  (I haven't even mentioned that we had a contentious election and an attack on the Capitol during this time.)  Thank God we had each other, supportive leadership, and cooperative kids and parents.  I can't imagine what people were going through in places that didn't have all of that.  One of the top five moments of my entire life was at the end of graduation that year when faculty and staff received a standing ovation from the parents of our kids as we walked into the aisle for the recessional. It took a moment to figure out what was happening, and then I felt all the feelings there are.  It was amazing.

When we took a photo together at the end of the year in our "We Did It" t-shirts, we knew it wasn't really over, but we were proud to have gotten through the most difficult year of our careers and had hope for the recovery.

I divide Covid into three parts - the virtual spring, the horrible hybrid, and the year that was supposed to be better (but wasn't).  When the hybrid year ended, most teachers and many students were vaccinated.  We spent the summer living footloose and fancy free.  Just as school was about to start back, the Delta wave hit, so we returned masked.  We had too; the numbers were just too high for anything else, and thanks to Omicron, we remained masked until Presidents' Day weekend.  We had some protocols around who could be virtual, so it wasn't as pervasive as the previous year, but there was still a lot of it.  We were in hybrid-lite, but the kids were done with it. They had been super cooperative with them the first year; I would see parents yelling on the news about masks and say, "This is an adult problem. The kids are fine with it."  That was true during the hybrid year, but if you made a word cloud of my 2021-2022 school year, the words, "Masks up" would have been the largest by a mile.  Things were supposed to be "back to normal," but unlike the beginning, there was no hard date on the end.  

Education has suffered in the world since the pandemic.  Attendance rates are at an all time low, not just in the United States, but worldwide.  Patience is low; demands are high. No one can agree on what to do about learning loss, or even if it exists.  And, since we never properly grieved (because part of the country, including its leader, doesn't want to admit this was real), we have not mentally and emotionally recovered from the chronic stress.

I'd like to reflect on the lesson we learned and what we can take with us, but this post has gotten very long.  So, let's call this summary part 1.  Next week, I'll try to bring it all together with some good lessons.

I'm Naming It - Chronic Stress Recovery Syndrome.

I don't respond to things appropriately anymore.  This week, five people were shot and killed four and a half miles from my house, and I have spent very little time thinking about it unless someone else brings it up.  Yet, I overreact to small setbacks during the day and laughed unreasonably hard at a story during this morning's sermon.  It's like the pandemic damaged my barometer.  My colleagues have reported they notice the same thing in themselves.

As it turns out, this is a symptom of dealing with chronic stress, which teachers and other essential workers have definitely been doing since the beginning of the pandemic.  Now that things are returning to somewhat normal, many have been feeling things they had not been during the height of the pandemic. I compare this to getting sick on the first day of Christmas break; your body knows how to power through the time it needs to an allows you to give in when there is a chance to use that energy in other ways.  While most people are calling what we have right now PTSD, I have been searching for another term.  For one thing, I am uncomfortable with the idea of being in the same category as those who have experienced acute trauma, like soldiers who have watched a friend die, kids who have witnessed and/or experienced abuse, or victims of bank robberies.  Our jobs were very hard, but our experience is not an acute high level event; it is a prolonged endurance of physical, mental, and emotional difficulty.  I have spent about a year searching for a name for what we are confronting, and I haven't found it.  Therefore, I have decided to name it myself. I am calling it Chronic Stress Recovery Syndrome.

Let me be clear from the start, I have no expertise or training in psychology.  What I'm good at is learning, so what I am about to talk about comes from reading and listening.  Also, I cannot speak to what this time has been like for doctors, nurses, restraunt employees, or Amazon delivery drivers, all of whom had to reinvent their practice at a time when their services were in the highest demand they had ever experienced.  I can only speak to teaching in my context. For me, that included a spring of remote teaching, a year of hybrid teaching, and year that was supposed to be normal but wasn't (due to the Delta and Omicron variants).  Also, since I have no professional expertise, my intent is to speak to those of us with relatively mild symptoms that we can treat ourselves.  If you are experiencing anything more than that, please seek the help of a qualified professional.

With those disclaimers in mind, here's what I have found.

The symptoms of chronic stress are:

• Fatigue - Teachers all over Twitter are talking about how tired they are.  I've seen things like, "I'm February tired, and it's only October."  (If you aren't an educator, you may not understand the idea of being February tired, but I have written about it before if you are interested.)  Any stress requires physical energy to manage.  During the hybrid year, we were learning so many new things, making decisions without being confident in them, and operating each day using every ounce of energy we had.  Some days, we operated at an energy deficit, and because it was a chronic experience, there wasn't time to refill those stores of depleted energy.  One thing I've learned is that fatigue may present itself differently in some people than others.  In most people, it will feel like exhaustion; in others, it may be muscle aches or soreness.  
• Emotional disregulation - This is what I was talking about at the beginning of the post.  You may overreact to some things and underreact to others.  As teachers, we have to be careful because answering an email from an emotionally dysfunction place can get us in trouble pretty quickly.  I found myself needing to apologize a few times last year for reacting to a student's behavior disproportionately.  
• Frequent headaches, digestive disruptions, and weight changes - Your brain and body are connected, so they tend to influence each other.  Fortunately, this is also part of helping yourself, so keep reading.
• Lowered immune system - Because your energy reserves are being used elsewhere, there isn't energy left for fighting off germs.  This is obviously not ideal in a pandemic.  You may also be more prone to injury and take longer to heal.  

So the news is not good for the chronic stress sufferer.  With time and intention, however, things can get better.  Here are some ways to help yourself, but don't expect it to improve overnight.  Your mind has been through a lot, so in the same way you would give your body time to recover from an injury or surgery, give your brain time to adapt to the new normal.  Here are some things you can do:

• Eat well and exercise - I know you are thinking that you can't possible exercise because you are so tired.  That's the paradox of exercise.  Once you have overcome the inertia, it gives you energy because your body is working the way it should.  If you go outside, you'll also get a much needed hit of vitamin D.  Grab a quick walk during lunch or your planning period, even if it is just five minutes.  Consuming nutrient dense foods will help with your immune deficiency and fatigue as well.
• Breathe well - Have you ever noticed during times of high stress that you take pretty shallow breaths.  You may be tired because you aren't fully oxygenating your blood.  It's posisble you havne't taken a deep breath in two and a half years.  I'm not suggesting that you have to take a yoga class, but a couple of times a day, take a second to notice your breathing and take a few deep breaths in a row.  It will calm you, decrease your heart rate, and help your blood pressure.
• Social interaction - One of the most difficult parts of social distancing was that we were, well, distant.  I went ten and a half weeks without being physically touched by another human being.  Even then, it was hugging my mom about once a week.  Thankfully, I have friends who made the effort to have lunches over Google Meet during that time and who made sure we talked for whatever time we could during the hybrid and depressed year.  We sat far across the room from each other while we ate lunch or after school, but we made each other laugh, which mattered a lot.
• Do things you don't want to - Early last year, when I noticed that I wasn't feeling right, I reached out to our school counselor (speaking of people who are still experiencing chronic stress - they are taking on all of ours - pray for them).  Perhaps the most important piece of advice she gave me was to do things I didn't want to do.  When you aren't mentally healthy, neither are your desires, so what you want to do is probably not what you should do.  You may want to stay home and curl up on the sofa with your cat, but you should do the opposite of that.  Following through on your commitments will help you feel a sense of accomplishment that staying in won't, and you will usually be glad that you participated in the activity once you are there.  Volunteer for something (It doesn't have to be huge, maybe a school activity or a church event that only lasts one day).  Meet a friend for lunch or a card game.  When you feel the pull of the bed or sofa, say out loud, "I should do the opposite of this."  You'll be glad you did.
• Gratitude - It is so easy to slip into cynicism.  It requires no effort at all.  Gratitude takes effort, but it is well worth it.  Unless you are a natural journaler, I'm not suggesting that you start a gratitude journal because you won't keep up with it, and then you'll feel like a failure, which helps nothing.  What I'm suggesting is that each morning or night (or both) that you think of something for which you are grateful.  It could be a small thing, like having enough school supplies when you know other people don't.  It could be a person you love.  It could be the fact that we aren't in masks this year.  It could be the flowers in your front yard or that you have a front yard.  Don't try to force yourself into something with rules (like writing down five things - again, you don't want to set yourself up for failure).  Instead, sit on the edge of the bed and think of something, anything, that you are glad to have in your life.

This will get better, but it isn't going to happen right away.  Every once in a while, notice that you are a little better than you were a week ago or a month ago, and make that one of the things for which you are grateful.  While there is no official diagnosis of Chronic Stress Recovery Syndrome because it is a term I made up, recognize that it includes the word "recovery."  It's not about perfection.  It's about getting better, and you will get better.

Mental Recovery

I didn't blog this weekend.  I posted that I didn't have any wisdom to share.  And I didn't.  Between the kidney stone I was battling and the atrocious week I had had, there was nothing in my head that I would have wanted in a public space.  It was dark in there, y'all.  

Here's what a long career does for you, though.  It gives you perspective.  Bad days end.  Bad weeks come and go.  Bad years feel crippling, but they don't have to be if you take steps to recover.  Recovery is important for our students to see because they have to do it too.

I'm not for living your life out loud with students.  There are professional boundaries to be set.  I do believe in being genuine and authentic with students.  Finding the line is tricky, and I have sometimes found myself on the wrong side of it; but my ultimate feeling is this.  If they go home worried about me, I've crossed the professional line.  They might say at the dinner table. "It was weird how upset Miss Hawks was in class today."  That's fine.  That's noticing something human.  They should not be losing sleep over it.  They should not be coming in the next day worried that I'll be that upset again.  Then I've shared too much.  

Recovery probably looks different for different people.  For everyone, I assume it involves sleep.  There's some kind of magical power in sleep that I've never really understood.  The Bible says, "His mercies are new every morning."  That may be Jeremiah's poetic way of recognizing that sometimes things seem better after a night's sleep.  (I'm sure there are Biblical scholars who know what it really means, but I do know that I have often been really upset about something one afternoon and wake up with a different perspective.)  Sleep well after a rough day.  It helps.  

Gratitude is helpful as well.  Recognizing that there are many things for which you are thankful can put those few things that are upsetting you in perspective.  It doesn't make them okay; it doesn't make them go away.  It helps you recognize balance in your life.  (On Twitter, where people have a very unbalanced view of my thoughts, I have been accused of toxic positivity.  I'm not talking about pretending everything is fine when it isn't.  I'm talking about recognizing life is not one day/issue/problem.  Life is more interesting than that.)  

The last thing is this.  Keep going.  The easiest thing in the world is to give in to the dark stuff and hide, but it doesn't work.  Darkness reinforces darkness.  Feelings of worthlessness are only made deeper by shirking responsibilities and not accomplishing goals.  You might adjust the goals or give yourself more time, but accomplishing something gives us a sense of . . . well, accomplishment.  One of the lessons I've learned from unfortunate grief is that the rest of the world keeps moving.  Bills are still due, and some stuff has to get done.  Will you do it more slowly?  Yes, it may feel like you are walking through water.  Keep walking.  Move slowly, but keep moving.  One of the reasons I am writing this now is that doing the thing I didn't do on Sunday will be better than not doing it at all.

Our students have been raised to either numb their feelings (medication) or soak in them (self-care).  Neither extreme is healthy.  We must model feeling them and recovering from them.