CONTENTS COVID VIGNETTES: A first-year teacher tells his story to make others feel less alone

Jaycob Yang: Finding a Way in the First Year

MEA member Jaycob Yang

began his first year of teaching in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. By December, he was burning out in his job working with Utica sixth graders in virtual school.

“Especially in the first half of the year, it was a difficult balance,” he said. “I was online all day, then I took an hour break after school. Then I would be working from 4 to midnight, because as a first-year teacher you don’t know how to pace yourself.”

Yang now goes to bed by 10 and figures, “It’ll get done when it gets done,” but he admits to questioning if teaching is right for him. Some friends from college have dropped out. “I will be 100% honest: the burnout is real. However, even though this is not what I expected, I recognize that this year is not the truth and I’m willing to give it another try.”

Yang is sharing his story to help other beginners feel less isolated. For the same reason, he is among the newest leaders of Michigan New Educators (MiNE), a group of early career educators developing networking and supports for MEA member peers.

“My message to other first-year teachers—if you’re having bad days or bad weeks and feeling like you want to quit—you’re not alone. And feeling that way doesn’t make us less worthy of being in the profession.”

Yang’s motivation for taking on a leadership role in MiNE echoes his reasons for becoming an educator: Representation matters. Yang did not have a full-time educator of color until high school, or an Asian-American educator until college. Attending largely white schools, without role models, weakened his confidence.

“I sold so many bits and pieces of my personality just to conform and fit in and not be as noticeably Asian. But it’s noticeable when you’re the only minority student in the class. It’s noticeable when no one sits with you at lunch. I often felt, because I was Asian-American, I was held to that higher standard, because of the ‘model minority’ myth.”

Yang knows the importance of connections, but they’re hard to make online with many student cameras off. The pandemic has added trauma, and his principal pointed out that everyone is grieving losses.

Yang is grieving the loss of interaction and what he expected his first year of teaching to be. The kids are missing normalcy and grieving the loss of their final year on the elementary campus.

Every day he includes talk of “roses and thorns,” allowing students to share frustrations and focus on “beautiful moments.” He looks for roses, too: His students greeting each other kindly in the chat, finding the courage to speak up, joking around and developing routines.

Jaycob Yang

One day, a student discovered the “praise” feature in the meeting platform and sent praise to the teacher. Suddenly others joined in—praising his ability to teach tough concepts, like fractions, and make them feel better when they’re sad.

“When there’s M-STEP to prep for and NWEA to prep for, and you have to keep up with your district’s pacing, it’s easy to forget the students are so thoughtful and there for you when you need them. And they know you are there for them, too.

“Seeing their appreciation puts things into perspective,” Yang added. “I’m effective where it counts, and it can be a normal year. There can be moments of beauty and joy and normalcy.”

Julie Ingison: Bus Driver Weaves Love into Job

Although the children on her bus can’t see her smile through the face mask, MEA member Julie Ingison makes sure they can hear the smile when she greets them by name each day. They also can feel her love through the huggable gift she crafted for each child over the winter.

The 22-year U.S. Air Force veteran—now a fourth-year school bus driver in Ludington—over several months crocheted a different stuffed animal for each of her 31 elementary school passengers.

“We were talking one day about what everybody’s favorite animal was, and I wrote that down,” Ingison said. “I thought it would be fun to make a stuffed animal specific to each child. No two are identical. I made a monkey, baby Yoda, jellyfish, an octopus, dogs and cats, an alligator and dinosaurs—it was quite a zoo I had going there.”

Ingison handed out the gifts at the end of a school day, wrapped with the student’s name on it. Most honored her request to wait until they were home to open it.

“They were so excited just to get something—before they even knew what it was,” she said. “Then for several days they were either talking about their animals or bringing them on the bus. And the fifth graders liked it just as much as my kindergarten and first graders.”

Ingison first learned how to make a few crochet stitches from a friend in the military in her 20s. Her aunt, a master of the craft, showed her more tricks, and Ingison eventually taught herself to read patterns.

For Project Stuffed Animals, she used some patterns to start but ventured into her own creative territory as well. “After making a few animals, you kind of figure out the basic body construction and it’s just a matter of making the ears and tails and tentacles that go along.”

A Lansing native, Ingison learned to drive a bus in the military and returned to it after retiring. At first she didn’t realize the job would put to use the Human Services degree she earned during active duty.

But driving a bus is about “more than getting them to and from school,” she said. “It’s about communication and building relationships. Something we talk about often is proper courtesies and conflict resolution, like how to handle it when someone is bothering them.”

This year, in addition to wearing masks on the bus, students sit in assigned seats to ensure as much

Julie Ingison

distance between them as possible. The regular seating pattern also helps with contact tracing if COVID-19 exposure happens.

Whenever she has a chance, Ingison gets to know the students in her charge. Because she’s kept the same in-city route for four years, she gets to see them grow and change— and eventually move on.

She lets the children determine the direction of conversations—if they want to talk about school, pets, hobbies, vacations, or some trouble that’s bothering them. “A lot of times it’s just a matter of listening. They want somebody to talk to who will listen, and that’s what bus drivers do.”

Chris DeFraia: Sharing a Rich Resource

Ferris State University Professor Chris DeFraia has experienced many of the same effects from the global health crisis as other educators. For one, the MEA member misses sharing advice, encouragement, and friendship with colleagues.

In addition, his genetics and biology students have seemed less engaged as the pandemic and mitigation measures to contain the virus have stretched on for a year. “And it’s really difficult to not follow them in being less engaged, because I get my energy from my students,” he said.

DeFraia also has juggled work while trading off with his wife on caring duties for their two-year-old daughter who could no longer attend daycare. (At one point he interrupted our interview to stop the cat poised to wake the child from her nap).

However, getting the hang of online teaching has been less of a struggle for him—and not because he had done it before. For about a year before the pandemic hit, DeFraia had been teaching himself how to make videos as part of a plan to “flip” his classroom.

Now he’s made a free, opensource series of videos for educators who want to learn how to make videos for teaching even after a return to physical classrooms. His YouTube channel, TeachWithVideo, separates the process into three types of videos, from easiest to most advanced.

“Teachers already have most of the expertise needed to make videos; the knowledge of their subject and how to teach it,” DeFraia said. “I’m just breaking down the video production part, to make it a lot easier to learn.”

DeFraia does not prefer online teaching, but using videos to shift class lectures and content delivery online allows him to use precious in-person time for higher-order thinking activities. “My students are going to be biology teachers, pharmacists, doctors, optometrists, dentists—they need to be able to reason and think.”

He decided to make the video series for educators when he realized he already had organized the information. Pre-pandemic he taught two aspiring biology teachers who wanted to learn to make teaching videos. “I was amazed at how quickly they learned, and their videos were excellent.”

DeFraia made the resource for educators that he wished to find during a year of teaching himself on a big learning curve.

His series instructs the viewer how to make a paper and pencil video, using a smartphone holder to record the teacher drawing on paper while explaining a concept. The next level of difficulty is a basic screencast, using a tablet and the Explain Everything app to make a whiteboard video.

Chris DeFraia

The most challenging of DeFraia’s tutorials is an advanced screencast which edits together audio and video recordings with added visuals to make a professional-looking product. The advanced videos require some equipment to achieve, which he explains in the tutorials.

Sharing knowledge and resources is something educators do, he said. He also is offering feedback to any viewers who want to share the first video they produce. “There’s very little out there specific to teachers and how to make good teaching videos, so I wanted to provide that.”

Find his channel, TeachWithVideo, at youtube.com/user/cdefraia.

Eric Hudson: Playing a Part to Beat the Virus

MEA member Eric Hudson

loves being surrounded by his orchestra students in Kentwood as each one contributes a musical puzzle piece to a mosaic of sound that becomes melody, harmony, rhapsody, symphony.

It’s also a fitting metaphor for the 37-year-old educator’s decision to join a clinical trial of a newly developed vaccine against COVID-19 last fall. “They needed 60,000 people, and I made that number one less,” he said. “I wanted to be part of making history and beating this thing.”

His journey in the trial reached its climactic pitch last month, when the vaccine by Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson received approval for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“I am an avid traveler. I am a social being, and being in isolation—not being around my kids every day, not traveling like I used to—I wanted it to be over. I wanted to be part of the solution.”

Unlike two other vaccines approved to combat the pandemic, the J&J shot needs only one dose— not two—and it does not require storage at freezing or sub-zero temperatures. “It could become an important way to get vaccine to more rural and remote areas,” he said.

Participation in the study required him to attend a six-hour orientation, complete medical questionnaires and tests, and sign a waiver before getting a shot of vaccine or placebo. The study was double-blind, so researchers did not immediately know who received which dose. Hudson answered surveys and attended follow-up appointments to monitor his condition.

He initially had no reaction to the shot and felt disappointed at getting the placebo, but the next morning he awoke with muscle and joint aches, possible mild vaccine side effects, he said: “Then I fully believed I got the vaccine—my brain can’t concoct that strong of a placebo effect!”

When Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and health officials prioritized school employees for vaccine in January, Hudson called into the study site and was told by a doctor who “un-blinded” him that he had, in fact, already received vaccine.

Meanwhile, at school Hudson has been doing his best to reach both in-person and remote students. To help, he’s used video performances and music software that automates feedback.

A cellist in the Holland Symphony Orchestra, Hudson teaches orchestra in grades 7-12 and leads middle and high school alternative orchestras before and after school. The Anything But Classical orchestra plays non-traditional music such as rock, bluegrass, Celtic, and more.

The pandemic canceled a scheduled trip to Ireland with his young musicians last spring, but now he’s looking forward to getting students fully back into music class—the place where Hudson and so many others have developed a sense of identity and belonging.

“That’s the dream I’m holding onto. I can’t say when, but it’s going to get better; I know it is.”

Eric Hudson

Sally Purchase: ‘Art is a little bit like a relief’

The pandemic hit MEA member Sally Purchase’s AP art students in Muskegon especially hard as they were interrupted by the sudden closure of buildings last March in the final stretch of completing a multi-media art exploration on a personal theme.

“We didn’t know they weren’t coming back, so here are these kids in their homes and no artwork, no art supplies,” Purchase recalled.

She had been working all year with students—about half of 18 seniors in Advanced Placement— bringing pieces forward for AP testing in May. Suddenly she was retrieving in-progress projects and art supplies from school, which she loaded in her car, drove, and dropped at homes.

She critiqued work via photographs and walked students through a difficult digital submission process, instead of the usual—packing the objects in a portfolio box and shipping them to Utah. “It was super rough, but eight of the nine kids passed the AP exam, and I was so proud of all of them for working it out.”

Purchase didn’t have time to rest on those laurels over summer. She served as the lone union negotiator of return to learn plans, consulting with the bargaining team but developing specifics one-on-one with the superintendent. “There were so many details to work out at three different building levels. But the schedule we came up with was innovative, and I think we did well.”

Muskegon had enough Chromebooks to sign out a device to each student. Ensuring all students had access to the internet was trickier, involving home and school hotspots.

To limit daily screen time at the high school, students took accelerated versions of half the normal number of classes—to focus on fewer subjects. Buses ran daily routes in the afternoons so students could come to buildings for tutoring or broadband internet access when needed.

Children learned remotely through winter until some elected a phased-in return to buildings starting in mid-February. In-person learning did not resume until staff at each site had been vaccinated.

Staff and families both have expressed appreciation for the focus on safety, Purchase said. However, it’s been hard to get to know students virtually this year when many did not turn on cameras.

She learned personalities in the chat and connected through art. She demonstrated techniques and recorded the live feed so students could follow along and play it back later to try again—“like Bob Ross,” she quipped. It could be hard to tell if anyone was listening.

But one girl in comments referred to Purchase as “titi”—a Spanish

Sally Purchase

term of endearment meaning “auntie.” Another called her “mom.” And Purchase continued packing and delivering art supplies to homes of students and picking up their finished works, which were even more thoughtful than in normal times and showed that students were, in fact, listening all along, she said.

“I’ve had kids tell me, ‘This is the class I really look forward to.’ I think they’re happy to have a non-core class that has a different vibe to it. It’s a change of pace and a little bit like a relief. Right now, art is really needed.”