‘I’ve never felt this beat down and tired’
Teachers from across Northwest Indiana struggle with working in person, online simultaneously
Allison Castle said she has never felt the stress she is experiencing as she teaches both inperson and online learning simultaneously.
There’s only one of her in the classroom, and she said it feels like she’s doing a job for two.
“I’m very well prepared to handle things and being an optimist and going into things with a good attitude,” the eighth grade teacher at Clark Middle School in St. John said. “I’ve never felt this beat down and tired.”
Castle, who has taught for 20 years, said she has come to terms with that fact that teaching inperson and online is what the rest of the school year will be like, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
“I’ve accepted that this is what it is for us this year, that we’re teaching both,” Castle said. “In the very beginning I thought — or hoped — that there would be some change where we wouldn’t be required to do both.”
Castle said she is an overachiever and trying to manage how to work with both sets of students has been stressful.
She tries to sit in front of her computer to teach so her online learners can see her, but then she feels distant from her in-person students — and the same thing happens if she does the opposite.
“I have never been a teacher that sits at my desk to teach, so that’s been super uncomfortable in that sense,” Castle said. “It hurts my heart because that’s not how I ever taught and when I’ve try to walk around the room and work with students in class and try to go back and forth, nine times out of 10 I do miss what’s going on in the chat (online).”
Castle was one of the teachers that spoke out at a Lake Central School Corp. school board meeting Monday to ask the board to give teachers more time, something she says she needs in order to continue with the school year.
At the meeting, the board discussed options to give teachers more preparation time for school, among them late arrival, early dismissal or passive learning, and said they will make a decision regarding what to do Sept. 28.
“We don’t want teachers to quit — the teacher shortage is real, if teachers leave the profession, we’re not going to be able to replace them,” Superintendent Larry Veracco said. “We can’t be deaf to their concerns.”
Kelly Barnes, a language arts and AP English teacher at
Munster High School, said finding out she would be teaching both in-person and online classes at the same time was like a punch to the gut.
The beginning of the year was clouded with question marks, and she didn’t know what to expect.
“I thought, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do it,’ ” Barnes said. “That feeling of ‘how is it going to work?’ There were so many questions around this year in the beginning.”
Barnes has a mix of both in-person and remote students, and she said teaching them both at the same time feels unnatural and makes her feel like she has to divide her attention between two separate classes.
“It’s really hard to split your attention between the in-person students and the remote students,” she said. “Just switching back and paying attention to them at two different times has been a huge challenge for me.”
Engaging remote learners and in-person learners at the same time can be a struggle, too, she said, and her students, both in-person and online, have to spend the day on a computer.
“I have to do everything with the e-learners in mind,” Barnes said. “So I can’t give them a ‘Catcher in the Rye’ novel, because I can’t get the novel to the kids who are at home, so we have to all use the e-books. If I’m going to give a test, I can’t give a paper-based test to my kids in class, because how am I going to get that to my kids at home?”
Other teachers, like Jamie Norris, who teaches kindergarten at Jonas E. Salk Elementary School have said they, too, have felt disconnected from students — but for different reasons.
Merrillville Community School Corp. is currently doing fully online learning, and while Norris doesn’t have to do in-person and online at the same time, she said her workload has increased, and she spends most of her time trying to make connections with her students.
“It’s so important (to make connections), especially in kindergarten,” Norris said. “Kindergarten is so hands on, but I’m learning more technology every day, and we’re all helping each other. It’s going, but there’s lots of frustrations.”
On top of an increased workload and the need to become more tech savvy, Norris said she doesn’t have the experience she usually has with the students in her class. Online interaction is different, and she misses seeing her students and being able to give them a hug every day.
“We miss our kids,” she said. “We just want to stay safe, we want to keep our kids safe. This is hard, and it would be nice to have the kids back in, I just want them to be safe.”
While teachers continue to grapple with teaching in different ways, they are doing the best they can given the current circumstances, Castle said.
“Not to toot our own horn, but we are doing a great job making it work,” Castle said. “But I don’t foresee how I can continue this same pattern until May. I can’t physically do it … if we don’t have extra time built in, I can’t sustain this, but I also can’t not give the same quality of education to my students.”