Back to school: COVID-19 edition

As the transition to online school progresses, students and teachers alike face struggles adapting to the virtual format

BY MARÍA JOSE CESTERO

A typical school day entails eating lunch with friends, walking around the halls and working on group projects. As COVID-19 infection rates continue to rise across the nation, students and teachers are being removed from their usual school environment and thrust into digital learning. For the 2020-2021 school year, Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) has announced various plans to support families, students and teachers during these trying times. Even with this support, the school community continues to face a host of struggles adapting to digital learning.

When school closures began in March, converting to online learning seemed simple. Students and teachers were to report to virtual classes for the few months remaining in the school year. Yet, what many realized was that distance learning has proven to be a challenge not only to the education system itself, but also to the mental and physical health of teachers and students.

According to a student survey conducted by highlights, 71% of students felt less sociable and 46.1% of students felt their mental health deteriorated, causing higher stress and anxiety levels among the student body.

Seeing how online school was executed and the effects it had on their children, 49.6% of MDCPS parents voted on putting their children back in physical school for the upcoming year. However, as COVID-19 positivity rates averaged 12.67% (to reopen they must reach a minimum threshold of 10%), superintendent Alberto Carvahlo

decided to start off the upcoming school year virtually, expressing his belief that it was the only way to educate while keeping students and teachers safe. Though schools are initiating online, MDCPS is preparing for the arrival of students with safety guidelines and protocols already set up at school sites.

“We are ready to resume schooling,” Carvalho said on NBC News July 29. “Our teachers are ready, our principals are ready, our students are ready, I believe our parents are ready, unfortunately, our community is not.”

As the starting date of Aug. 31 rapidly approaches, MDCPS is attempting to resolve concerns and problems that came up at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. One of the biggest changes is the switch to a platform called My School Online (MSO), which is supposed to replicate the interaction, schedule and education that physical school has provided. MDCPS has also addressed the class time conflicts by returning schools to their daily or block schedule and confining teachers to class period times. Additionally, they have moved start times for high school until 8:30 a.m. for Phase 1 to have more fluid times across grade levels.

Though MDCPS is taking great strides towards making distance learning equal to in-person learning, there are certain aspects of regular school that will be nearly impossible to replicate virtually.

Student interaction is among the most difficult feats to approach as schools look to start the new academic year. Sports, clubs and student bonding cannot take place physically. Apps such as FaceTime and Zoom have been extremely popular as ways to interact with friends or classmates safely, but there is only so much socializing students can do through a small screen.

For teachers, the challenge lies in ensuring students are completing an appropriate workload to properly grasp the curriculum while also being sympathetic to their students’ frustrations. The shift to distance learning has proven to be a challenge as teachers try to keep their students engaged and participating in the lesson from miles away.

“Since [school is] all online, [assignments] get all piled up at one point or another,” sophomore Matteo Rocha-Chaves said. “If you didn’t have a teacher on a certain day they would just assign things even though you wouldn’t really have them in physical school.”

Both sides of the online school equation have their fair share of individual woes, but they also share struggles in balancing work, online school and home life in general. Distractions such as siblings and children can complicate the amount of time they dedicate to school in general. Bringing students’ and teachers’ main source of stress, school and work, into the household makes the environment more susceptible to distractions.

As the effects of online school could extend past digital learning, highlights considers the effects on students and teachers.

STUDENTS

The radical switch to online learning has many students dreading a return to school. Many students do not have the high bandwidth or mental capacity that online courses are dependent upon, making digital learning a tenuous task. Students grew up in the physical school environment, learning hands-on with the teacher merely a few feet away from them, keeping the classroom attentive and focused. As the transition to online school continues, many struggle to adapt to learning directly from their homes.

In March, MDCPS tried to combat student struggles with technology by giving devices to all students, contracting reduced Internet rates and giving Wi-Fi hotspots to those in need. MDCPS will continue to provide these resources, however, students’ home lives can also be problematic because of siblings, home responsibilities, and the accessibility to other distractions that the teacher can’t control. This program ensures all students are ready to continue their education virtually, not just those with access to steady, working WiFi. Though MDCPS is taking great strides towards making distance learning equal to the schoolhouse model, the switch from one to the other will have effects on students that are out of MDCPS’s reach.

The online school system managed to digitize classes, but after school activities and stress relievers such as sports had to be canceled. Many of these activities were the students’ main ways to alleviate stress and anxiety build-up and their removal made getting through online school much harder. In a recent poll conducted by the highlights staff, 73.4% of students admitted to feeling less productive since the start of

online learning and 68.1% admitted to procrastinating more. Without stress relievers and fun activities to look forward to, students felt suffocated by school-related responsibilities, causing their overall productivity to diminish.

“I play for the school’s varsity volleyball team and our season was cut short because of COVID-19,” junior Diego Moran said. “So when it was all canceled, it definitely hurt the team. Especially the seniors that were trying to complete their year strong.”

Digital learning also had a negative impact on students’ social abilities. A study conducted by the US National Library of Medicine showed that children that experienced enforced isolation were five times more likely to develop depression and post-traumatic stress. With students feeling lonelier as social distancing continues, rekindling old school friendships will prove difficult as time moves on.

Studying from home further challenged students’ time management skills greatly. By not having strict time restraints, students’ sleep schedules were affected, decreasing their performance in online school. A study conducted by the University of Utah and Dr. Kelly Baron, a clinical psychologist specialized in Behavioral Sleep Medicine, showed how stress and sleep are a bidirectional relationship. This means that in especially stressful situations, such as the online school workload, the human body is hypervigilant to what’s going on around it, not letting the brain go to sleep effectively.

“Since we didn’t really have a strict schedule, I would complete my assignments late at night and wake up around noon, so I didn’t really learn anything I was given,” sophomore Ella Allocco said.

TEACHERS

The goal for online learning is to help students get the best experience for their education while considering their mental and social environments. However, teachers also face major challenges as they hastily learn new programs, think of creative ways to digitally make their lessons exciting, juggle keeping the same level of academic excellence and take care of their life at home.

Many teachers have memorized their curriculums and teaching methods like the back of their hand so online learning is forcing them to have to adopt innovative ways to engage their students from their homes. In addition, once teachers were given their rosters in Mid-August they had just one week to train for their new online teaching platform and will not have access until the first day of school. The district hosted training sessions starting on Aug.19 but many are still unsure how they will be able to teach their students effectively or manage several communication platforms and if they will be able to smoothly transition back into the physical classroom once Phase 2 is reached. Some teachers need time adjusting to the new platform as their classes mostly require kinetic experiences. Classes like art, culinary and physical education are hands-on classes that almost completely require the presence of the students in the classroom in order to make them work. Others, such as Special Education (SPED) and ESOL teachers, work best with their students if they are face to face, providing lessons in real time for their students as a way to keep them focused.

“It’s not organic to not have the kids present in front of you,” SPED Autism and Spectrum Disability teacher Ivette Feeney said. “Being able to show them physically or tactilely, explain something to them or have them see it in front of them is much different to doing it from a computer screen.”

Some teachers do not have a problem with transitioning to an online format, but instead have problems with the responsibilities and distractions at home preventing them from being actively available to their students. Teachers with children in the household have to watch over and take care of them 24/7, regardless of work responsibilities. This constant supervision makes focusing on work extremely difficult, especially when children in the house will also be attending online school and will need help adapting. Distractions like these are what makes some households an unsuitable place to teach and learn effectively.

“Teaching my classes and taking care of my two year old will continue to be a challenge,” science Department Chairperson Tanya Philips said. “Being a mommy and a professional at the same time is one of the hardest tasks that I have ever had to do. [My son] has participated in practically every Zoom session, regardless if I was meeting with my students or my boss.”

Whether it is taking care of their household responsibilities, chores or thinking of creative ways to keep students engaged in their online lessons, teachers face a great amount of pressure h as online school continues to replace in-person schooling. h