Item
Teaching in the "New Normal"
Title (Dublin Core)
Teaching in the "New Normal"
Description (Dublin Core)
My friend John is a high school math and physics teacher on Staten Island. On March 25, 2020 he sent me photo of his laptop screen. Schools had been closed for about ten days and he, like many other teachers across the state, had to improvise how to continue educating in this radically new reality. He wrote, “Proud of myself today. I figured out how to record myself and my notes.” I compared it to the setup of Governor Cuomo’s daily press conferences which were a unifying and relied-upon source of information in those early days of the pandemic. When I asked him to reflect on that lesson he said:
“That early in the pandemic I was lucky I was good with tech so I immediately started recording lessons for students to watch asynchronously. In my mind it was the best way to keep continuity. (I would bet at that time I thought we would be back in school before the end of the year). That lesson in particular is very visual (the right hand rule) so I wanted to figure out how to have notes on the screen and myself to be able to show how to use the right hand rule. I tried to do as closely, as I could, what I would have done in class. I tried to have the students continue hearing from me. The videos were posted so students could learn asynchronously. I did host some live sessions where they could ask questions on anything they learned. We could not mandate synchronous learning because families could have multiple students sharing a computer or even parents who now needed to work remotely, etc. That policy changed in Sept. 2020 when we gave out laptops so we could say you have your own meet at your normal class time.”
“That early in the pandemic I was lucky I was good with tech so I immediately started recording lessons for students to watch asynchronously. In my mind it was the best way to keep continuity. (I would bet at that time I thought we would be back in school before the end of the year). That lesson in particular is very visual (the right hand rule) so I wanted to figure out how to have notes on the screen and myself to be able to show how to use the right hand rule. I tried to do as closely, as I could, what I would have done in class. I tried to have the students continue hearing from me. The videos were posted so students could learn asynchronously. I did host some live sessions where they could ask questions on anything they learned. We could not mandate synchronous learning because families could have multiple students sharing a computer or even parents who now needed to work remotely, etc. That policy changed in Sept. 2020 when we gave out laptops so we could say you have your own meet at your normal class time.”
Date (Dublin Core)
March 25, 2020
Creator (Dublin Core)
John DeMartino
Contributor (Dublin Core)
Gabriella Leone
Type (Dublin Core)
Screenshot
Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)
English
Education--K12
English
Online Learning
Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)
text
teacher
Cuomo
teaching
online
laptop
improvisation
Staten Island
Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)
teacher appreciation
adaptability
technology
asynchronous learning
teacher
resilience
Staten Island
New York
school
Collection (Dublin Core)
K-12
Date Submitted (Dublin Core)
03/25/2023
Date Modified (Dublin Core)
04/04/2023
Date Created (Dublin Core)
03/25/2020
This item was submitted on March 25, 2023 by Gabriella Leone using the form “Share Your Lockdown Staten Island Story” on the site “Lockdown Staten Island”: https://covid-19archive.org/s/lockdown-staten-island
Click here to view the collected data.