Month: April 2022

Throughout my recent blog posts, I have explored the different ways that COVID-19 has impacted education, mostly from a student standpoint. Today, I want to take a look at how educators have struggled as well, since they play such a crucial role in all of our lives.

According to this article from NPR, many teachers went into the 2021-22 school year expecting it to be a bit better than 2020. In the end, quite the opposite occurred. This article states that “some teachers are ready to quit while others are breaking down in school bathrooms amid overwhelming pressure.” Between managing multiple classes of students, handling expectations from higher up, and navigating the new online remote learning systems put in place, it has definitely been a huge challenge for teachers to do their job over these past two years.

Although I do not have personal experience trying to teach students since I am still one myself, I have seen close up the struggle. Both my aunt and my uncle are educators in the same school district with different positions. My uncle has worked with IT in the past, so navigating the technological aspects of the pandemic were not as much of a problem for him. For my aunt, she struggled more with feeling disconnected from students every day. Adjusting to teaching through a screen threw a wrench in both of their lives in different ways.

On top of these struggles, teachers face many of the same issues their students do. Mental health breaking points and managing life at home with kids or other family members provided the same problems it did for many kids during this time. Without being able to send their kids to school during the day, teachers became responsible for making sure their own families were stable with things alongside their students online.

I know that teaching little kids takes a lot of patience and effort normally, so doing so from online rather than in-person must have posed even more unique challenges than ever before. I can only imagine how difficult this type of job became as the pandemic progressed.

Overall, although it can be easy to focus on how we personally have been impacted by COVID-19 academically, it is important to keep in mind that our teachers, principals, guidance counselors, etc. all faced similar (if not the same) struggles at different points in time. They are only human, and deserve the respect and admiration we can provide them with for pushing through such a tough time.

As I have discussed previously on this blog, online and remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has presented both new challenges as well as opportunities for improvement in some areas. Today, I want to talk about how online learning during the pandemic played a crucial role in the lives of kindergarten and early elementary school age children.

It can be easy to only think about how kids our age were affected by remote learning, but at least we were old enough to be self-sufficient at home or just away from school in general. What about the kids that were still learning how to read, count, or even identify colors? These students likely faced bigger challenges than anyone else.

Having four younger cousins on one side of my family, I saw first-hand how online learning impacted kids ages 7-11 at the time. My younger cousins were not only struggling to learn basic information, but they had to rely on their parents more than ever too in order to get access to their learning. Some kids needed their parents to turn on a computer, let alone help them learn their work. My one cousin was about 8 when COVID first hit. My aunt works as a RN at the local hospital, and is a single mother with two kids and a dog at home. She explained how a lot of the time, the responsibilities to help her youngest fell to her older son, who was only 11 at the time, while she also relied on family to watch the kids at times when her or her ex-husband could not. The older brother had to help his little brother with making sure the computer worked, got his homework done, and answered his questions throughout the day along with managing his OWN school work. When my aunt was home, she often had to help both of her kids with internet connection issues and other things.

All of this extra responsibility on parents was a huge aspect of the pandemic that I think often goes unseen. My next-door neighbors are a young couple with three kids, ages six, three, and just under a year. While both managing their own jobs from home online, they often asked my sister and I for help babysitting during the afternoons and weekends once vaccines came out and other safety measures were able to be taken. I saw just how much help kids this young require with technology as well as academic material.

Although all of this information is nothing new, my question is this: will there be long-term effects for kids who missed out on crucial lessons in the classroom during COVID? I think yes. Students who were learning the basics of education, things like reading and spelling, will use these skills for the rest of their lives. Putting so much responsibility on the parents or whoever is at home to help teach them when educators could not do more because they were remote is a huge thing not many people recognize right now. I personally have seen one of my young cousins, who struggles with severe ADHD and other learning issues, have serious challenges in later elementary school now even back in person due to the inadequate lessons he had during an important phase of childhood.

With all of this, I just wanted to end on one final but important note. Although this post talks a lot about the struggles parents and students faced, it is NOT the teachers’ fault. They did their best with what they had, same as everyone else. I understand it is probably just as hard for them to teach as it was for some kids to learn.