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New teaching normal

Jeanne Sager - Columnist
Posted 4/13/20

The assignments from the teachers have come in at a trickle. A project here. A test there. The Zoom meetings have popped up suddenly and with little warning.

Here's what I've seen: Teachers are …

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New teaching normal

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The assignments from the teachers have come in at a trickle. A project here. A test there. The Zoom meetings have popped up suddenly and with little warning.

Here's what I've seen: Teachers are starting to make sense of their new normal.

It's not like anything they ever planned. The school year started like every other school year on record. Kids tumbled off of buses and out of their parents cars.

They slammed their lockers and strutted into their classrooms, full of themselves, hormones and anxieties.

They pulled out their pens and notebooks, and they began to make sense of geometry and calculus, civics and economics.

They went to homecoming and football games. They planned pep rallies, and they prepped for dances.

They mastered sentence structure, and they figured out fractions.

And then it all blew up.

The kids were told to stayed home. They lost their sense of drive.

They're forced to start over.

The teachers are too.

They're forced to move everything online, to start teaching a classroom full of kids in Zooms, where they don't even have eye contact with their 20-plus students.

I have a confession to make. I'm a grown up. I use Zoom every day at work. I lose focus. I'm not a 5-year-old who wants to take my tablet into the bathroom to go potty. I hold my focus.

Teachers aren't dealing with me. They're dealing with the 5-year-old.

The phrase “new normal” keeps being thrown around.

Entering the post office just two people at a time is a new normal.

Wearing masks to the grocery store is a new normal.

Eating restaurant meals at home after picking them up curbside then Lysoling everything in sight is a new normal.

So too is educating a nation's children. Parents are doing the best they can. Kids are doing the best they can.

Teachers are doing the best they can in a new normal.

This isn't what we planned for, but it's not what they planned for either. So let's give them a break... and a thank you.

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