Pandemic Teaching 2020 – a year in review
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It was not business as usual for any of us this year. Teaching wasn’t business as usual, and neither was drawing a comic strip about teaching. Neither was blogging about teaching (which for me, didn’t happen a whole lot).
But now, on the last day of 2020, I felt a need to look back on this year’s pandemic teaching strips. No, the pandemic isn’t over. I’ll still be addressing it in 2021. But turning the page to a new year still seems as good a time as any to look back.
The year began well enough, with Mr. Fitz making his new year’s resolution – one I still think is worthy of all the resolve we can muster…
The year progressed as usual, but I guess I was pretty far ahead on my writing and drawing, because although I’d heard about Corona virus sometime in January of February, I didn’t begin to realize the kind of impact it might have unit spring break in March – a spring break that quickly moved from one week to two. And so I decided to take a strip about code-red school shooter drills and update it for the age of Covid. It became the first strip about the virus affecting schools…
Spring break 2020 was not a time for travel. But it was a time for reading. So I again reverted to a Sunday-style strip about the Fitz’s at home…
As spring break’s second week arrived, it was announced that we would be staying home, an event I recorded in the strip by drawing the most ambitious Sunday-style strip I’d done to date. I had a blast drawing it.
As teachers around the country scrambled to become virtual teachers, I found myself pondering how we define teaching. Is simply dispensing someone else’s video content really teaching? You can guess my answer…
I believe the questions raised by the move to online teaching are important ones. Online learning has been touted by many pundits as the wave of the future, but what many of us found is that the human connection necessary to teach is very difficult to establish or even maintain using online platforms. If I’d ever doubted that teaching is about more than “downloading” static facts, that it is, in fact, about human connection, my doubts went away now. I realized, more strongly than ever, that I had not gone into teaching to dispense standardized curriculum.
Sadly, this realization came to me because I saw so many students getting lost and disengaged in the standardized, online platforms… And so many students who were engaged apologized for their engagement, I guess because they were bugging us at home. Nothing could have been further from the truth…
Our district went to a “hold harmless” policy for grades this spring; students couldn’t get a lower grade fourth quarter than they had gotten during third quarter. It really ticked a lot of teachers off. I saw a lot of teachers saying that without grades, students won’t work. My experience proved to be different…
My wife teaches seniors, so I wanted to address the experience of having schools closed during your senior year…
And then there was the day I went to school to pick up a few items. The surreal quality of this very different school year never felt… more real.
Being at school made me miss being at school for real, which inspired another Sunday strip…
The contrast between my Pre-IB/ Honors classes, which I was actually teaching, and my regular classes, which did the standardized “Edulicious” work and checked in maybe once a week, became more and more pronounced at the year drew to a close. I wanted show the contrast.
I also began to hear from some of my honors students. They were doing canned curriculum in other classes, but really appreciated my non-standard class…
During individual online chats with students, I was frequently struck by how much they were trying to juggle trying to learn at home while dealing with other home-based responsibilities. Some of our students had to grow up fast…
As the spring progressed, though, I began to find more humor in this new world of online teaching…
But I also began to feel strongly that the pandemic was offering up lessons, in real time, about what teaching should be… if only we would listen.
As spring semester ended and summer began with no where to go, life seemed kind of… the same.
As the new school year approached, our district, like many districts, decided that having us teach in class and online simultaneously was a good idea. I imagined what it would be like – and I was not really exaggerating, it turns out…
Bad idea or not, we went back for pre-planning…
And then, the actual start date approached. My dreams got funky…
But things also got very real…
But to keep my sense of humor, and attempt not to despair, I turned to parody and satire…
As the year progressed, we had to deal with schedule changes – both face-to-face and virtual…
I gained students who didn’t appreciate being moved into my class. I lost students who had loved my class.
The further we went into this brave new school year, the weirder it got… I realized I didn’t recognize my students from the eyes down if they lowered their masks….
The school year was beginning to feel like… The Twilight Zone!
We reached Thanksgiving Break, but it was hard to change gears to head home…
I realized that I had planned this year of strips to be about erring on the siding of thinking. I realized it hadn’t turned out that way.
In the end, Molly suggested the word for how we all got through this year. In analyzing the lyrics to different versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, she hit upon the truth of 2020.
But then break came. The most-needed break many of us have ever taken…
The new calendar year approaches. We are all bracing ourselves. What I have not dealt with in the strip is the real human cost of this pandemic – the loss of human life. Within the confines of the classroom though, I hope I have recorded the absurdities and even the bits of humor to be found even in a year like 2020. Drawing the strip helped me through the year. I hope reading help some of you in some small way. What I hope we can remember is that the real work we do as teachers still matters – more than ever in fact. Teaching is always, always hopeful for a better future. Why else would we be doing it?
Here’s hoping that the signs of hope we see around us all come to fruition, and that 2021 helps make up for 2020.
Obviously, this post was a highlights reel. If you’d like to see more of the Mr. Fitz version of 2020, there are many more strips available at www.mrfitz.com!