Learning is an ‘oasis’ for kids, teens in treatment
Teachers visit school-aged patients for hour-long bedside school sessions
Sarah Adair walked into the hospital for her first day of work this school year and saw her former student, fresh from a checkup of his new heart.
The boy stayed in the Montreal Children’s Hospital for a year as he waited for a heart transplant. Adair was with him every day.
“I was his Grade 2 teacher for the whole school year,” she said. Then this summer, he got a new heart.
“Seeing this student with his mom, walking freely with no cords or machines or hospital beds, just being a regular kid with that freedom, it’s what any teacher wishes for their student.”
Adair is one of five teachers who go bedside to bedside at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, leading lessons for children who go to the hospital for cancer treatments, dialysis and other regimens that call for a longer stay.
“We represent stability and something that’s predictable in their lives,” Adair said.
Medical personnel come and go constantly from the children’s rooms. Teachers visit each student for a one-hour session, and in that brief span a child can focus on themselves and their own learning, Adair said.
“It was almost an oasis. School was a precious time in his day and everyone knew that at 11 a.m., that was school,” Adair said.
Employed by the English Montreal School Board and the Commission scolaire de Montréal, the hospital’s teachers instruct elementary and high school students. They teach English, French and math, but they are flexible, leading a science lesson or another subject if the child needs it.
“There’s that positive outlook of getting out of the hospital and picking up where you left off. It kind of cements the idea that this is a step toward many other steps down the line,” said Peter Tsatoumas, another teacher at the hospital.
The differences between teaching in a school and teaching in a hospital emerge in overall approaches and daily details.
Students can’t share textbooks because it could cause cross-contamination, so Adair and Tsatoumas mostly use online resources.
The children are often hooked up to wires and tubes; the job isn’t one for the easily unsettled.
Adair once taught a handwriting lesson to distract a child while they had their blood tested.
With the ongoing work of nurses and other staff doing their jobs, there is often little privacy.
Sometimes parents take advantage of the respite offered by a one-hour lesson to take a nap in the room, Tsatoumas said.
“When you’re a classroom teacher, you’re sort of the boss. It’s your classroom and chances are nobody’s watching you,” Tsatoumas said. “Here, you’re part of the team.”
As the school year goes on, the teachers try to establish a regular schedule with each student. But flexibility and creativity guide everything they do.
“Sometimes, you don’t know what your day is going to be like until you arrive and talk to the other professionals, see who you can visit, how they’re doing,” Adair said.
If a child has homework, it’s often because either the parents or the child asks for it. Exams are determined on a case-by-case basis in collaboration with the school board.
“It’s really not fair to evaluate what they produce,” said Tsatoumas, adding the teachers always have to consider and adjust to what the student is able to do and what is fair to expect from them.
Tailoring their teaching to fit each student is a “luxury” and a “privilege,” Adair said. It’s something that teachers who prepare lessons for dozens of students don’t have.
But the work isn’t for everyone, said Tsatoumas. One of the children he worked with died.
“It has made me a more grateful person,” said Adair, who has young children herself. “I try to appreciate the moment, and health and togetherness, that freedom to leave the hospital at the end of the day.”