Tech In The Time Of Covid

THE TIME OF COVID

In a crisis of unprecedented proportions, Brooklyn Tech faced the challenges – and prevailed.

SILENCED SPACES: THE AUDITORIUM. PHOTO BY CAROLINA HOJAIJ AT BROOKLYN TECH, it was the same as it was everywhere: an unrelenting nightmare with waves of loss, stress, and anxiety.

But through it all, there was more: There was resilience. There was strength. There was resourcefulness.

And at last came near-normalcy: In June, a Graduation Day with cheers, confetti, and perhaps more joy than any before it – over what the graduates had gone through to get there.

Brooklyn Tech prevailed.

It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t ideal. As the long school year’s end finally approached, principal David Newman would say:

“We’re in a war. We got beaten up a bit, but victory is coming. Everybody rallied together like soldiers.”

A SAMPLING OF WHAT it was like for “everybody” – six thousand students and three hundred staff: • Three out of four students attending class from home via laptops (the school provided one million dollars’ worth of them to those in need) – many in small apartments with sisters, brothers, and even parents doing the same in adjoining rooms. • About 700 students per day venturing into the school, just a handful in each classroom. Between classes: footsteps resounding

“EVEN WHEN THE WORLD STOPS, YOU CAN’T.” - Student Saira Masud

discomfitingly in silent hallways, the usual signs of exuberant humanity eerily absent. • An unfamiliar new norm for in-person

“hybrid” students: two days in school, then two days at home as other students went in: Was today an Odd “A” day, or an Even “B” day? Every three weeks the calendar offered a day off – a mental health break for all. • A school day redefined as four double periods. Lunch reduced to a grab-and-go bag to take home at day’s end. Virtual gym: do the workout in your bedroom. Virtual “office hours” with teachers, to compensate for the lost face-to-face time. • Teachers and students alike discovering that it was possible, sort of, to do a lab experiment online. Teachers learning to talk to a computer rather than a human audience. • The social relationships that mark adolescent life brutally interrupted, only to re-emerge in new forms: group hangs on

Zoom for homework sessions, late-night online group chats. • Failing students (there were slightly more than usual) getting an “Incomplete” and a

semester to make it up. • Even while dealing with chemistry or calculus, students asked by parents to help care for younger siblings – an unexpected early preview of adult life and parenthood. • Seniors, some with relatives falling ill and even dying from the coronavirus, facing college applications on top of their regular course work.

“EVEN WHEN THE WORLD STOPS, you can’t,” said then-sophomore Saira Masud, attending school from an apartment with two siblings plus a mom also taking remote classes.

As Saira shows us, this is a story of resilience. As then-junior Maddox Clarke, experiencing the oddity of near-empty classrooms, nonetheless observed, “The Brooklyn Tech machine is still running.”

EVENTS AND PROGRAMS WERE VIRTUAL. INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION KEPT “THE TECH MACHINE” RUNNING.

For instance:

Through logistics wizardry, administrators found a way for all scheduled classes to take place, live and synchronous, all year. It was a feat some smaller schools could not achieve,

Most of the school’s approximately 200 clubs and activities functioned in some form online: Members of the origami club crafted their creations on kitchen tables, then posted photos online.

The perennial champion girl’s Step team, accustomed to performing under bright lights and big crowds, competed from their bedrooms by Zoom – a synchronous display of 15 dancers, each in her own tiny onscreen box.

Three plays were staged online – each actor in his or her home. Props were mailed to the cast; costumes were whatever the performers found in their closets.

Sports shut down for a year, partially reopening in spring 2021. Competition took a second seat to conditioning and simply to “getting kids together

for some sort of normalcy,” athletic director Josh Rubin said. The sophomore class organized a “Mental Health Week” of stress-easing activities: origami, games and creative writing. The Alumni Foundation’s Con Edison summer internship and Weston Research Scholars programs carried on virtually. With the college The Alumni Foundation labs that host the Weston students shut, students and the TechTimes improvised home replications of their experiments team express their condolences to all members of the Tech community who lost loved ones during the or researched online. They presented their work at semester’s end in a virtual science fair. Two seniors co-authored a study that got published in a research journal. The Alumni Foundation staged a popular “I Am Brooklyn Tech” virtual event featuring celebrity pandemic. alums, entertainment, and large doses of school spirit. Homecoming went virtual as well, Alumni and parents teamed to fund a virtual Senior Gala, to replace the prom that couldn’t be. And fittingly, a reality-bending year closed with the school shut all summer for repairs. Summer school enrollees were handed a Metrocard and directions to the alternate location….. Stuyvesant High School. ■