‘More work and a lot scarier’: SLO County teachers begin an online-only school year
Jocelyn Johnston, a third-grade teacher at San Gabriel Elementary School in Atascadero, was exhausted when she got home after the first day of school on Aug. 12.
Granted, Johnston said she’s usually tired after a full day in the classroom teaching young kids how to write in cursive and multiply numbers together.
But this year is different.
Johnston is teaching her students virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic shutting down public schools across San Luis Obispo County. She, like so many other teachers, had to approach the school year completely differently.
“I felt kind of like a first-year teacher all over again, to be honest with you,” Johnston said, who has taught third grade for four years.
From preschool to high school, teachers had to find creative ways to keep students engaged while learning through a screen.
How to prep for an online-only school year
When prepping for a new school year, most teachers find new ways to decorate their classroom or make worksheets that will engage their students.
This year, however, teachers had to rethink what their classrooms would look like and how students were going to get the materials they needed to learn.
“It’s definitely been a lot more work and a lot scarier,” Nipomo High School math teacher Kelly Bellew said. “And the idea of taking what we normally do so well in the classroom and making it work in a digital environment is terrifying.”
For Bellew, the biggest challenge was managing a new schedule. She now only sees students every other day instead of every day.
For other teachers, like Johnston, the biggest challenge was finding out how to keep students engaged.
“In general, it’s good to have hands-on practice: paper and pencil,” Johnston said. “You can’t just do everything digital, especially at that young age.”
Johnston said she spent much of the summer planning because she had to gather all the physical materials her third grade students will need until winter break in December. The students picked up their boxes of school supplies, worksheets and other materials on the first day of school.
“It was just a lot more prep than usual,” Johnston said. “It was a learning curve — trying to think of what do we need? What do we need them to have? All for the whole trimester.”
Curriculum changes for SLO County teachers
One of the largest changes for teachers has been a shift in curriculum requirements.
Normally, teachers have standard, statewide curricula they must teach. That’s supplemented by additional coursework that, while helpful, is not needed to get a student to the next grade.
Now, however, teachers have less time to instruct students than they normally would.
In previous years, the state required that the minimum number of instructional minutes per day was 200 for kindergarten, 280 for first to third grade, 300 for fourth to eighth grade and 360 for high school.
Under a new bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the state reduced the daily requirements for the 2020-2021 school year to 180 minutes for kindergarten, 230 for first to third grade and 240 for fourth grade through high school.
Most schools in San Luis Obispo County are following a split-day schedule: teaching half of the kids for a few hours in the morning and returning to instruction in the afternoon. The time not spent on Google Classroom, Zoom and other online platforms is used to work on classwork.
“We obviously can’t cover as much as we would in a traditional day when we taught our kids five hours a day,” Bellew said.
Bellew said the math teachers from the district she teaches in, Lucia Mar Unified School District, got together to figure out what curriculum they needed to focus on — and which concepts they could forego.
“We picked out the (requirements) that, if we have time, we’ll get to them,” she said. “But if we had to skip them this year, it wouldn’t be detrimental to student success going forward.”
David Osterbaur, an English teacher at Mesa Middle School in Arroyo Grande, said he and his fellow teachers have not had to cut much from their curriculum.
“We kind of pared down a few of the standards,” Osterbaur said. “I teach seventh grade. What do they really need to know to move on to eighth grade successfully?”
Instructors miss the classroom environment
When students logged into Google Classrooms for their first few lessons of the school year, Bellew said, something was different.
“I miss the noise in my classroom,” she said. “The side conversations that the kids have, like when they’re working on a problem together.”
Now, students are hesitant to speak or blurt out questions because of the way the online platform makes it difficult to hear one person over another, Bellew said.
“It feels like I’m teaching to no one even though I know they’re all there,” she said.
The digital environment isn’t all bad, Osterbauer said.
He can now talk to students one on one without others overhearing, he said, and students can pop back into his Google Classroom if they are having difficulties with classwork.
“It’s almost like they’re sitting next to me — they can ... show me whatever they’ve been working on, and we can still have those good conversations,” he said. “None of this is ideal, but there there are some aspects of it that I think are fine.”
Johnston said she has been pleasantly surprised with how well her third-grade students have adapted to online learning. Their ability to grasp the concepts and adjust to a “new normal” has exceeded her expectations, she said.
Sticking to a daily routine has been incredibly important for her young students, she said, and despite the occasional technology glitch, things have gone smoothly.
“All my students are trying as hard as I am to make this work, and they all missed school so much and all really want to see their friends,” she said. “For now, this is better than nothing.”
This story was originally published September 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
