April 16, 2020 — County schools have been closed for a month, and teachers and parents are beginning to adapt to remote learning: the missing connections, the added responsibilities, and what they hope will carry over when normal life returns.
Eryn Schon Brunner teaches dance at Mendocino College and lives rurally outside of Willits with two sons, a four year old and a ten year old. I got in touch with her after reading her comment letter to the Planning Commission about the April 16th meeting, which was held virtually. She wasn't able to attend, because it was scheduled for the same time her son would be in his virtual classroom. She wanted the Commission to postpone the meeting to a time when it would be possible for more people to speak publicly about their thoughts on the 143-foot-tall communications tower that is proposed for Pine Mountain. (Update: the Commission did hold the meeting, but delayed that item until May 21st.)
Schon Brunner feels fortunate that she can get satellite internet, but her family only has one computer, so when her son meets with his class online, she has to pick between other obligations and his schooling. “And for me, education comes first,” she stated.
Doing school online is a major adjustment for everyone, but for her son and his schoolmates, it’s a paradigm shift. “We attend the Waldorf School of Mendocino County, so there is no internet or device oriented education until the eighth grade...so academically, he’s had little to no contact with that sort of technology. So to then put him on technology, it changes up our whole philosophy of education...he looked at me the first time I said we’re going to use the internet for school, and he said, my teacher’s not going to allow me to do that! She’s going to be mad at me if we do that! And I said, actually, she’s requesting it. So, you, know, the rules are changing, and for a ten year old...who’s really in a place where rules are important to him...that’s a big shift for him”
Life has changed drastically for high school seniors in Ukiah and Willits, too. Trish and Jeff Silva-Brown are a married couple who have been teaching for about twenty years. She teaches economics to seniors at Willits High School, which is on a trimester system. He’s a history teacher and department chair of the history department at Ukiah High School.
Jeff’s students have Chromebooks, but two of them don’t have internet. Some of the students are thriving, even doing better than they did when school was in session the old fashioned way. But, Trish said, “I do have some students who are struggling to have access to technology.” In the first week, 88% of her students participated in the new online way of doing things. She gets the parents involved, emailing or texting them using a service called Remind, which allows her to communicate with students and parents without exchanging cell phone numbers. She’s trying to do one assignment a day, which sometimes involves trading pictures of completed textbook work via text message. “For some students it’s a little bit better” without all the social and sporting distractions, she said; but “Some of my students have told me they now have to jobs, or they’re having to take care of their siblings while the parents work, so for some of them, it’s really hard to complete the work right now.” Jeff estimates that about one-third of his students “are now working adults. They’ve gotten jobs at Costco and Safeway and Raley’s. They’ve just gotten hired to be retail, on the front lines of the virus, so we really have to work around what they’re doing and still trying to get them to succeed and walk the stage at the end of the year.” He adds that about 70% of his time is spent checking in with students one-on-one, making sure they are holding up mentally, and maybe working a little bit of academic content into the communications. Lectures and PowerPoints are not about ten minutes long, out of consideration for the stress, emotional health, and attention spans of young people taking on so many responsibilities in such a hurry. Also, teachers are mandated reporters for any kind of abuse, so they have to be laser-focused on the possibility of unsafe conditions while they are on video with students. “All those responsibilities have been kind of amplified through the online forum,” he notes.
Schon Brunner is pretty cautious about her young son’s online safety, but she has a whole different set of challenges with her college dance class. “They’re actually in-person classes, and you get graded on being present,” she said. “So you actually have to show up. So putting those onto an online platform has been tricky. Because of things like time delay, or the limitations of the visual and the spatial, live action doesn’t work so well with dance.” She’s doing a lot more work with training activities, and the history and culture of dance.
The teachers said they think the increased technological skills are probably a long term benefit, and that the remote way of doing things could stand them in good stead for the next disaster.
“It’s turned into kind of this beautiful experiment, and they’ve decided they want to make dance on film,” Schon Brunner said of her students. “So they’re getting an education they probably wouldn’t have gotten if we weren’t in this predicament.”
For now, though, said Trish Silva-Brown, “I really miss my students! I love my job.”