A Slow Burn – Sixth Post in a Series

Woman sitting under Starbucks Umbrella
Heidi at a Starbucks

Sitting in a Starbucks drinking an iced vanilla latte, our routine on working mornings in Singapore, Heidi sighed, “My physical response to this whole thing is becoming more obvious to me – as the uncertainty drags on and on, I feel more and more anxiety, like a slow burn.” Her shoulders ached, jaw sore. She played cat and mouse with sleep each night, with long waking periods through the murky hours when she’d grab her phone and resume the endless process of gathering new information that cancelled what had been true just hours before, trying to cover existing frustrations and anxieties with new information. Concentration was an increasingly fleeting luxury, main thoughts elbowed aside by crowds of wonderings, worries, and what-ifs. It was February 25, just over a month since we’d left for our two-week holiday.

It was also a couple weeks since our school had shifted to online learning. Like most schools, our did not have an existing online platform that students and teachers knew. Every teacher felt like it was their first year again, that time where you had almost nothing in your toolkit to create engaging lessons and manage wayward students. Lessons you knew were effective in the classroom fell flat online. Students would fail to turn their cameras on, so it wasn’t clear whether they were actually “attending class” or off playing games on their phones. Students felt awkward on camera, for their own appearance or the appearance of the space they occupied. Consequently, many had legitimate reasons for avoiding the camera. Many were distracted by COVID, and a few might have been lazy.

There were so many technology issues in the early days of online teaching, for students and teachers. Heidi faced a particular one: student couldn’t hear her; her various microphones weren’t working. We bought other earbuds and headsets. They didn’t work well. It was hard to lead an online class when you were effectively on intermittent mute. After the third pair we purchased, a more tech-competent colleague walked her through re-installing some drivers on her computer, and she finally had consistent audio. It took several days, and was just one more source of anxiety, one more brushfire to stamp out during that chaotic first week of online teaching and learning, when it seemed all you could see were brush fires.

Parents were frustrated with their new enforcement roles, making sure students were online and attentive. Always concerned about the quality of education received by their children, normal concerns were now amplified by general pandemic anxiety. At our school, with a hefty tuition, parents wondered whether they were getting their money’s worth online and considered pulling their students – causing a whole lot of anxiety for school officials as well. Those worries came back to teachers in the form of demands to be more effective, more accommodating, more fun, more focused, more creative. Work harder. Give more. Teachers had to do this without experience, and in the face of their own pandemic anxieties, uncertainties, and dislocations.

For every parent demanding more, another was demanding less: more rigor, less rigor; more time “in class,” less time “in class.” Some students were crumbling under the pressure while some parents thought too little progress was being made. In reality it was all true. Less learning of curriculum was happening because teachers and students alike were using most of their COVID-diminished learning bandwidth just to understand the new systems.

One of our teachers worked each day from the balcony of a loaned condo in Malaysia, under lockdown not in her home country, and not in the country where she officially worked, but in a third country where she happened to be when lockdown came. She worked from the balcony because her husband worked inside, and it was too noisy for both of them to work from the same space. She often showed her students the view from her balcony, and one a day a student said, “Please take us ‘outside.’ We’re too afraid to go outside ourselves.” Try teaching in the face of that.

In those early days virtually no one was satisfied. Everyone was exhausted.

Our school’s shift to online learning represented a more complicated process because a substantial part of our faculty and some students were spread across the globe, ranging from Madagascar to Mexico City, Dubai to Toronto, and all across Asia. Time zones and internet access were immediate issues. Being a Chinese school also posed particular problems regarding the internet. Google was forbidden behind the Great Firewall, as were many other programs where people could easily present information (like Youtube) or share files (like Dropbox). Tools used by teachers around the world were not available to our faculty.

Kudos to our staff. In those early weeks the faculty WeChat messaging system filled with questions and answers, tech and techniques. People were working hard to teach, and working even harder to help each other teach successfully. Our colleagues had lots of frustrations and failures, but they did not feel alone. Questions posed at all hours of the day or night received prompt and supportive replies, the threads filling with hacks and successes, frustrations and victories, fires and firewalls. Gradually the community was finding ways to succeed.

We had no idea when in-person school might resume; the provincial and city governments were driving that decision in a process that was completely opaque to us. However, reports indicated that grocery stores in Nansha were again reasonably stocked and people were able to get out and about a bit more freely. It seemed prudent to get there reasonably soon, serve our quarantine, and continue to work online from our apartment so we were ready when school opened.