Here’s What I’ve Learned From Teaching High School Online
By: Stef Evilsizer
Tags: Teenagers, Teaching And Learning, High School, Online School, Teaching

This time last year, and every December 1st prior for several years, I was in school with my students. The holiday buzz was almost palpable as we crossed the three week bridge between Thanksgiving break and Winter break. Final exams are coming up shortly, and students and teachers are vacillating between the excitement of finishing the semester and the anxiety of finishing the semester.

I work in a suburban public high school in Colorado. Of the few high schools in the district, mine is the most diverse and, some would say, the most challenging to work in. I feel incredibly fortunate to have wound up where I am, given the interesting start to my teaching career. Fresh out of college and with my newly-earned teaching license in hand, I was hired as a Health and P.E. teacher at an all-male maximum security youth correctional facility. Prior to working there, I didn’t realize that youth offenders were still required to attend school, though maybe I just never had a reason to think about it. But they are, and in that situation, it means that school has to go to them. On the campus at that particular facility, which housed about 200 of the region’s most aggressive youth offenders, I was tasked with maintaining order and security above doing my actual job, which in my mind, was to teach these kids something about living healthy lives. As a twenty-something woman working in that environment, I faced some interesting challenges. That’s probably a story for a different day, but the point is the start of my teaching career was a bit unconventional, and that is why I feel so lucky to have landed where I am now.

My current school has about 1,300 students enrolled this year, meaning it’s fairly small in size as far as suburban high schools go. My students run the gamut from young, innocent 8th graders (we have an early high school program for gifted 8th graders), all the way to very mature seniors, some of whom even look and probably act older than I do. Because I teach elective courses, many of my classes have all ages of students mixed together in the same group. This can be a blessing and a curse, depending on the day. My average class size is around 30 students and I have to say that most of my kids are good people, even when they smart off in class, make poor choices, or don’t show up for class or finish their work.

Last spring, when the pandemic was just kicking off, I remember being at school and talking about how crazy it was going to be if they shut us down for a while. A week before our scheduled spring break, they announced we were going to be staying home due to the newly discovered virus spreading quickly across the globe and had recently hit our county. I said bye to my kids at the end of that week, even getting hugs from a couple of them just in case this was the end of our year together. And that was it. We had an extra week for spring break, then we were brought back online to teach and learn for the remainder of the year.

Teachers, students and parents all across the country can attest to the disaster that “remote learning” was back then. Teachers were thrown into the deep end with almost no notice or time to prepare, and although we did the best we could under the circumstances, it was not a perfect process. It was fun for a while though, when we had that short period of time when parents were singing teachers’ praises once they realized what a difficult job it is! Remember that?? For a moment in time, teachers were recognized as the hard-working superheroes they really are. It was amazing! Too bad it was short-lived.

Over the summer, we finally had time to breathe and wrap our heads around how different our jobs may be in the foreseeable future. Endless articles to read, webinars and Google Meets to attend, professional reflection and refinement, and staff development days took up the last few weeks of our precious time off. Once we were informed that our district would be returning in the fall with a hybrid schedule, we had x number of days to adjust our lesson plans and instructional practices to meet the demand. Thankfully, my school’s principal, administrative team, and instructional coach are all wonderful and supportive people. I cannot count my blessings enough for this…many teachers can tell you how miserable their job is if any of these people are not a joy to work with. Due to our strong and positive leadership, my school was largely successful in our transition to a hybrid model.

We spent the first eleven weeks of this school year in that hybrid model, right up until the second week of November (which happened to coincide with the elections…this was not a coincidence, but I digress). I saw half of each class in person once per week and online once per week. This translated to me feeling like I had 12 small classes of 10–15 kids, instead of six classes with 20–30 kids. It was a little strange at first, but we adjusted well and things were flowing pretty smoothly. Although our time together in person was brief each week, with just a single 90-minute class period, we did a good job of meeting our objectives and making good progress in class.

The first Friday in November, I left school early to take my son for his senior photo shoot. After I left school around lunchtime, I got an email from the school principal about a “stand-up staff meeting” after school that day. That’s code for “something is happening and we need to tell everyone at once.” None of us were surprised. In fact, there was a betting pool among the teachers in the building about when they would push us back to all-remote learning again. My bet was that it would have happened earlier in the semester, so I lost a couple of dollars on that one. Seeing the larger picture in retrospect, the timing makes perfect sense. We were informed that due to the number of positive cases within our building and the growing infection rates in the surrounding community, we would have the weekend to prepare and then would start all-remote classes the following Monday.

So here we are, finishing the last three weeks of our semester entirely online. It feels almost like we’re back in March again, only this time we are a little wiser and a little more experienced. My students are working as hard as ever, at least most of them are, while being forced to adjust, once again, to a turbulent environment. Which brings me to my purpose in writing this article: Things I Have Learned.

The ‘Things I Have Learned’ about my students:

It’s obvious to tell in this environment which students have stable home lives and which ones have difficult home lives. When we’re all together at school and away from our homes, it’s much easier for them to camouflage their struggles at home. Here in the remote learning world, not so much. It’s eye-opening and sometimes heartbreaking.

This isn’t news to teachers, but the students who typically do well at school in person are the same students who are also doing pretty well with learning online. There are a few surprising exceptions, though. I have kids who show up to every single online class, when I didn’t see them once when we were in person at school. Likewise, I have kids who did very well in person and have all but disappeared in the online environment. What works well for some kids doesn’t work at all for others.

This generation of kids has grown up with all the technology, unlike myself and the generations before. They are comfortable with screens, cameras, mics, and videos, which is really a blessing at this point. I would have been mortified if I had to submit a video response for an assignment when I was a teenager. I still don’t like to be photographed or video recorded. Their comfort level with technology has been criticized (“they spend too much time on their phones”, etc.), but in this case it is serving everyone pretty well.

Teenagers don’t get enough credit or recognition for their resilience, strength, conscientiousness, and efforts. I follow my school newspaper’s Instagram account and just earlier today, our students put together a “Letter to Our Teachers”, which acknowledged and thanked us for our hard work and patience with them as students. It was insightful, thoughtful, and perfectly on-point right now.

As not-quite-yet-adults, they still need our guidance and support more than ever! As a parent myself, I am guilty of sending my kids off with their computers and letting them just get to work while we’re here at home together. That works fine sometimes, but we need to remember that most kids are not yet adept at time management or task completion when they are given so much autonomy. They’ve done a fantastic job of learning those skills this past year, but they’re not totally there yet. Heck, I’m an adult and I still struggle with those things while working from home!

I can safely say that I have also learned many things about myself through all of this, both as a teacher and as a parent. I’ll save that for another time, but I want to end with this:

Whether you are a teacher, a parent, or a student, please work towards finding balance. As a Health and P.E. teacher, I talk to my students all the time about the three aspects of overall health and well-being: Physical Health, Mental/Emotional Health, and Social Health. We need to care for each of those aspects of ourselves in order to be our best, healthiest, happiest selves.

It’s easy right now to lose that balance, especially for young people with limitless wi-fi, unending entertainment, and distractions on the screen right in front of them. We need to remind them to GET UP, MOVE, work their muscles, talk to others, and not stay isolated behind their screens. Even if they can only make one small change at a time, start with something simple. Staying hydrated, getting some fresh air and sunshine, or just getting up to stretch and walk around will help maintain that important balance. It will also help them avoid slipping into a negative mental state like I have witnessed happening to many of my students.

As we crawl over the finish line of this semester, please show some acknowledgement of the resilience of the teenagers in your life. Let them know that they’re not alone, that we see them and understand how hard they’re working right now, and that we appreciate them. After all, they may be the generation that ends up saving this world which is hurting so much right now. They need to know we have their backs.