Teaching Through the Pandemic
By: Declan Ryan
Tags: Covid 19, Woodstock, Bubble, Teachers, Schools

Teaching Through the Pandemic

Fifteen minutes from the Maine border, my mother and my hometown are taking it one long day at a time Declan Ryan Follow Dec 13, 2020 · 8 min read

The dining room table has become my mother’s home office. (Declan Ryan photo)

On a quiet evening the day before Halloween I was preparing my tripod, microphone, and other recording equipment for a story I was shooting in my hometown. The story was a sign of the times, about a haunted drive-thru the town of Woodstock, N.B., had organized as a safe activity during the pandemic. I was making sure my tripod would be stable enough for a static shot on rockier terrain.

My mother, Darlene Skinner, came to my door and asked when I wanted to have dinner. Then she dropped the news: a student at her school had tested positive for COVID. I had heard about the cases in Moncton and Fredericton, but this one was in the school where my mother worked.

We always knew this could happen, but this was close to home. My mother decided I should spend a week at my father’s house in the nearby town of Northhampton in case more cases emerged or if she discovered she had been potentially exposed to COVID.

I remember the day the pandemic became real for me. I had attended classes at St. Thomas University in Fredericton earlier in the day. We had been following the “flu” in Wuhan and Italy in my International Relations class, talking about the likelihood of a wider pandemic, how serious of a threat it was, and comparing its mortality rate to that of the flu. By the end of the day, I was in my off-campus dorm sitting on my bed watching YouTube videos. I had been keeping to myself all week as the idea of a pandemic became wide-spread. I always carried hand-sanitizer in my pocket, used tissues on doorknobs, stopped hanging out at the Regent Mall and generally avoided common areas.

Then the email arrived stating that STU was shutting down, telling everyone to either stay in their dorms or leave immediately. Within hours, I was saying goodbyes and having one last hurrah with my fellow students at Rigby. The next day, I was back home in Woodstock with my mother. In a moment, everything had changed.

My mother was expecting some time away from her school for a different reason. “We were debating whether we were gonna have a snow day the next day because the weather forecast was calling for significant snow here,” she recalls. “We were kind of joking around that we might get a day-off tomorrow woohoo!”

My mother is an art and literacy teacher at Townsview School, a K-8 school with 600 students that serves the Woodstock area. Our community is your typical mid-sized town; everybody knows everybody and most have lived there their entire lives. My family moved here around 2004. It has grown over the years. An hour from Fredericton, Woodstock has become the go-to spot for smaller communities for shopping and now has a modest collection of stores including a Walmart. The most newsworthy event we’d had before the pandemic was a murder a while back; the idea of COVID coming here just seemed absurd. Nothing ever happens here.

Last March, I watched my mother adapt to a digital school system. She would often spend all night on the couch with her laptop and a mug of coffee on the table, papers and grading spread out, our cat sound asleep beside her. Mom would just be typing away, hardly paying attention to the TV playing in the background; she’d barely look up from her work whenever I came upstairs and spoke to her.

On weekends, the dining table became her workstation piled with papers, assignments, and report cards. These were the scenes in our home until June. I was also studying online, but it was a far cry from what my Mom was dealing with.

I had done online-learning before in High School. A complete set of online courses was stressful but not impossible. My biggest problem was motivating myself to work. I began working courses into my home routine; I watched lectures as I made myself meals in the kitchen. I completed assignments before dinner, and readings before I turned in for the night. I listened to lectures from the comfort of my bed while my cat Atticus was curled up asleep against my leg. It’s a constant for me to have Atticus by my side as I work, even as I type this story.

“It wasn’t as bad as you think,” my mother recalls. “I knew the learning platform that we were using fairly well. I have a great team that I work with so we helped each other as much as we could.” What was most stressful for my Mom was not having the same connection with students she had in person; she couldn’t reach them the way they needed her to, or the way she wanted to. “Not all students had devices to use and many had inadequate internet service.”

Those who did have decent internet access had little experience with online learning platforms. A lack of direction from the School District didn’t help.

“Students were provided with learning opportunities weekly and at the same time told they did not have to complete the work as it would not be graded,” she said. “It was challenging to create work that all students, no matter their academic needs, could access knowing that not one student would return their work.”

School administration and staff had to coordinate the sudden shift to an online platform. Steven Jones, vice principal of Townsview, never expected the school to be closed for the rest of year.

“First it was kind of like oh it’s a few days off you know. We can catch up on what we need to, and it was after the March Break so we were starting to look forward to spring.”

Yet as the days turned to weeks, it became frustrating.

“You knew kids were missing out,” he said. “You knew kids were losing learning opportunities.”

While teachers struggled to keep their students on track, administration had to deal with little information to pass along to teachers. Even when they were ready to get kids learning again, most teachers and families weren’t equipped for online learning.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t think kids in that learning time accomplished much for the most part,” he said.

Students may not have been learning, but New Brunswick and other Atlantic Canadian provinces had created a rare safe space in the global pandemic. The Atlantic bubble had fewer cases than anywhere else in the country or the United States. In New Brunswick, we had just over 500 cases, compared to over 1,200 in Nova Scotia, and over 56,000 cases in Ontario. Maine, with its northern border just 15 minutes from Woodstock, has had over 11,000 cases.

Classes at Townsview have been held in person this year, but are taught in their own bubbles of up to 25 students. A school week at Townsview is now four days. Fridays are now for teachers and staff to have meetings or plan lessons. Students can only interact within their bubbles, must wear masks when required to, and must sit and eat at designated locations. All gyms and equipment are regularly sanitized and disinfected after use. Teachers travel to different classes instead of students and must properly distance and wear face-shields. The bubble system means more classes, which means less time for teachers to prepare. Extracurricular activities and sports are limited to ones that can be distanced; sports like badminton in particular have worked well for distancing. However, with all these measures come new stresses.

Darlene Skinner is an art and literacy teacher at Townsview School in the town of Woodstock, N.B. (Declan Ryan photo)

My mother goes to work at 7:30, teaches until 3:30 then comes home with work to grade, and lessons to prepare. “I go outside on my deck and just clear my head every morning with a cup of coffee, and every evening in between marking,” she says. Guidance Counsellor Courtney Fox says because teachers now travel to classrooms, they lack a “home base” for prep-time. “There’s no downtime for some of these teachers when they’re running back and forth and that’s a huge change,” she says.

There is a greater focus on students’ mental health. Teachers regularly check in with students, ask them how they’re feeling and help them if they feel overwhelmed. Students have been resilient but share some of the same worries as the staff. The bubble system also frustrates students who are unable to be around their usual friends.

“The middle school kids in Grade 7 or 8 who last year would have traveled to their classrooms and had their day broken up by the movement, I think they are feeling the change because they’re stuck in their classroom all day,” says Fox. Kindergarten students adapted the best according to both Jones and Fox because this is their normal; they just go with the flow. All things considered, the students and staff were adapting the best they could; but nothing could have prepared them for what lay ahead.

I had spoken to Jones and Fox just a few days before the case emerged in Townsview. Jones in particular was very happy with how things had been going this year; he had mentioned trying to put a drama program and a basketball team together under these restrictions following the success of their mandates and badminton program. A student testing positive changed everything. The school saw a swift decline in attendance.

“We were at 40 percent capacity on the first day after,” Jones said. “It grew steadily throughout the week to where we were pretty much at full capacity again by Thursday.”

Public health staff cleaned the school for a day, then directed teachers that they were to keep operating as normal and that they would give them further instructions should more cases emerge. “I think in this case, and certainly not being able to go into details, the way it entered the school had nothing to do with the school or any of the policies that we had or things we had put in place,” Jones said. The student who tested positive as well as those in their bubble self-isolated, and no other cases emerged in the two weeks following the announcement.

My mother thought they opened again too soon. “Most parents are just afraid of sending their kids here but they can’t keep them home because they have to work or just aren’t equipped for it.” There has been an increased focus on checking in with students, but is it enough? So far, it seems to be.

Many other schools and campuses have seen a rise in cases and exposure compared to Townsview. Townsview has had one case after two months of in person classes. Other schools, especially in the U.S. report hundreds of cases regularly.

It’s been a few weeks now since the announcement of a student testing positive and life has gone back to normal, if we can call this normal. I’m back at my mother’s house, attendance has averaged out at Townsview, and no other cases have emerged. My mother is just going with the flow like she had been all year. “You just get into a routine,” she says. “We have to just take it to day to day.”

Declan Ryan is a St. Thomas Journalism student currently attending classes from home in Woodstock, New Brunswick. Born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Declan moved to Woodstock in 2004, where he has lived ever since. He graduated from Woodstock High School in 2018 and is now in his third year at St. Thomas. He is majoring in Journalism and Communications. This story was written for the class, The Power of the Narrative.