Far from normal

When teachers weren’t planning their weekly lessons or cleaning desks between class periods, they were overwhelmed with concern for how best to reach their students, especially those in a virtual setting. For AP English 3 teacher Blake Hollowell, who teaches three virtual classes out of four periods, the greatest obstacle in terms of adapting to digital learning has been losing the ability to familiarize himself with his students’ lives. 

“I think it’s difficult for virtual teachers to really be able to anticipate the problems that come with virtual learning on the students’ side,” Hollowell said. “There’s not much I can really do to be aware of students’ individual circumstances, so I really don’t know what’s going on in their lives as I would if they were in the classroom. I could make judgments, I could make observations and adjust to those students based off of what I see. But when I can’t communicate [with] them in this informal classroom setting, it’s difficult to really understand what they might be going through.” 

Champion, too, faced a similar difficulty as far as communicating with students in a virtual setting, noting the way he teaches online differs significantly from his in-person instruction. He expressed feeling a loss in humanity, a loss in the social aspect which has long characterized the educational profession. 

“Online learning is task-based because there’s not the back and forth,” Champion said. “It’s ‘I will give you a task,’ [whether] it’s ‘Watch a video, listen to me talk about it, interact with it.’ Yes, we can have some exchange, but most people don’t turn their cameras on. Most people aren’t interested in sharing themselves to an online persona. [In] my experience, it’s broadcast only. It’s me giving a task, and then the student does the task, gives it back to me, gives me a task [to] grade, I grade it, give them a task of ‘Fix this.’ It’s task-based. We’re exchanging tasks as opposed to exchanging conversations and emotions and humanity.”