By Benjamin B. Murphy
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Alyssa Scheirer grabs a black coffee and then does what many teachers are doing these days: she set up her online learning platform for the students learning from home.
“I have less time to plan for lessons and activities that I’m doing for the kids,” Scheirer said. “Nobody talks about how draining virtual teaching is.”
Like Scheirer, teachers across the country are changing up their lesson plans and routines as COVID creates a new age of remote learning for students and teachers.
“I, at this point, didn’t think I would ever feel like I was a first year teacher again, but I do,” said Deb Tulone, a sixth-grade teacher at Oley Valley Middle School in Pennsylvania. Tulone is entering her 25th year of teaching but feels she is working harder and longer days than she ever has before.
With her school district moving entirely online for the fall, Tulone said that she is struggling to learn and adapt to the technology required for teaching her students.
“In my opinion I feel like I am behind the eight-ball technology wise,” she said. “I feel like I’m working harder because I have to learn all of this new technology.”
Tulone said that when schools first moved online last year, there were a lot of issues with Zoom, security-wise and functionally. To help with this problem, all virtual classes were moved to using Schoology, meaning every teacher had to learn and master a completely new teaching platform to teach the students.
Scheirer’s school district, while not completely online, still has virtual meetings for kids and parents who want it on Google Classroom and Class Dojo. This means she must teach her in person classes full of 4-year-olds, while also learning two virtual learning platforms.
COVID learning is not just affecting the teachers at the younger levels of education. Even experienced college professors are struggling to adjust to the new age of remote learning.
“Professors can’t get that feedback that they would normally get in a live classroom,” said Andy Sinclair, a professor at Wilmington University in Pennsylvania. “We can’t ask a student a question if they’re on mute, so we don’t even know if they are sitting in front of their monitor at that time.”
Sinclair has kept a positive attitude through the new learning adjustments, and it helps that he had already been teaching courses online before this all started.
“It certainly cuts down on my travel time,” he said with a chuckle, “that’s about 45 minutes to an hour of driving to campus I don’t have to do every day.”
Tulone wants students to know that teachers are doing everything they can to help the students and they are working day and night to make this year go as smoothly as possible.
“I can’t think of any teacher who isn’t putting forth 150 percent during all of this,” Tulone said. “I know a lot of times we’re made out to be the villains, and that’s definitely not the case.”