THIS IS A GUEST POST BY A YOUNG INDEPENDENT SCHOOL TEACHER (currently in search of a position after his previous school downsized due to COVID, BTW). I’m delighted to share Will’s perspective here.
Conversations about the start of the school year have been dominated by the question of remote learning. The transition in spring was hard to accept; when my school left campus and moved online in mid-March we were scheduled to return in-person first on April 13th—the end of our spring break—and then May 4th, and then we would certainly, at the very least, have a traditional in-person graduation sometime in August.
The reality we face right now has in some ways been much harder. We need look no further than the day’s headlines to find colleges and school districts canceling after only a few days back together. Educators, parents, and most importantly students are now more aggressively pushing for a fully remote start, and it looks like administrators and policymakers who have been dragging their feet are finally being made to confront reality.
This is good news. Even if the chance was missed to spend the summer doing really excellent professional development and plans are simply being dusted off from the spring, schools can start knowing that everybody will be a little bit safer.
But what if the need for remote learning extends beyond the fall and for the 2021 half of the school year? Even if we get a vaccine in the late fall, it will still take time for it to roll out and then for vaccination rates to reach safe levels.
I will stick to thinking about the costs of a fully remote year just for this year. Countless people who have spent more time than I have gaming this out have identified many challenges. What I want to focus on is the loss of non-class student–teacher interaction. It’s harder now to chat with a student after class and build these intangible relationships that are core to the independent school value proposition. No more do we see our advisees in the hall or sidewalk and get to ask how the math quiz went. Nor do we get to coach our students, or direct our students, or volunteer manage our students in co-curricular programming.
A huge missing part is casual but regular interaction with students we don’t even teach. How do we feel like a school community if we teach either in pods or remotely, seeing no one we don’t teach or have a class with? The loss of co-curricular activities means the weakening and loss of inter-grade network. An obvious example: captains and older leaders who won’t have the chance to bond with underclassmen and inspire them to stick with an activity and pursue it seriously enough to aspire to leadership themselves—and who sustain these bonds beyond graduation and stay in touch, first giving advice on college and then life.
And for teachers, let us imagine Fall 2021. We are all back in the classroom when suddenly we discover we’ve all just been freshly hired. We’re each the neophyte again who doesn’t know anybody’s name or a thing about them. We’ve spent all of last year in remote students of concern meetings but that feels unreal; it’s a student who was new last year, or we didn’t coach, who didn’t first have an older sibling we taught. Now we stare at them from across the Harkness table and realize we know nothing about them. Maybe we coached them, but it was in a spring sport, none of which have happened since spring 2019, and their face has slipped somewhat from our memory.
Schools are thinking about how to remain communities while remote. This worry isn’t new here. I write this only to ask about those who we don’t, but might yet teach. Could teachers, throughout the year, occasionally step into the classroom of the grade level beneath them? I beg for the chance to gain impressions of students before I teach them that isn’t just filtered through my colleagues. Of course I trust what they pass on, the insight they’ve gained, but even when the experience is positive and they like a student, everybody deserves a clean slate. I want to be able to see everybody the way I will. (And this diversity of perspectives can be crucial; to know a learner differently allows, for example, letters of recommendation that provide a more complete picture.)
I hope that schools can spend a little bit of time thinking about next fall. We’ve never had to do this before, but that’s the point. We’re being robbed of things that happen as part of a hidden curriculum and being forced to make them explicit. Let’s find ways to expose students and teachers to each other even if—especially if—it’s not in the classroom.