South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Distance learning? ‘It’s exhausting’
A look at 4 students across the US on a typical day of classes
AMERICUS, Ga. — At first, many schools announced it would last only a couple weeks. A year later, the unplanned experiment with distance learning continues for thousands of students who have yet to set foot back in classrooms.
Comfortable homes and private tutors have made it easier for those with access. Expectations are higher at some schools than others. And growing numbers of students are being offered in-person instruction at least part time.
But students of all backgrounds have faced struggles with technology, the distractions of home life, and social isolation. The Associated Press followed four students on a typical day to find out how they’re coping a year into the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s not quite 9 a.m. and Kristen King is on her living room couch, a Chromebook propped on a TV tray.
“It’s been challenging,” says the 17-year-old junior at Americus-Sumter High School in Georgia. “I like hands-on help from my teachers. We can’t really see our friends, like our school friends. We can’t really socialize with them. We can’t really do anything.”
Her Advanced Placement English instructor puts on a recording of a speech President George W. Bush gave Sept. 11 — part of a discussion about tone in writing and speaking.
Kristen, who is not a morning person, fights off yawns, plays music to help her focus and messages with friends.
“The first 30 minutes of
class, I won’t really be there,” she says.
Kristen says she has kept earning As and Bs this year, but it’s been harder.
“I feel like I’ve learned less than what I’ve learned in school,” Kristen said. “The work is more independent. We really have to learn on our own.”
In Espanola, New Mexico, Javin Lujan Lopez joins a video chat with his football teammates for study hall. It’s a way for the Pojoaque Elks football players to spend time alone, together.
His first class is finance. When the teacher asks how the owner of a lemonade stand might increase their profits, Javin types his answer in the chat: “Raise the price of the lemonade.”
He moves on to his only other class of the day, physical
education. The 17-yearold senior has a camera set up to show him on the porch, where he has a bench press and weights. But when the teacher announces the students don’t have to log their workouts, Javin says he’s not even going to go for a run.
He’ll be exercising at football practice, and besides, his friends are online now, playing Call of Duty.
Javin isn’t sure what will happen after graduation. He’s considering a welding certificate program at the local community college. He applied to universities in New Mexico and Colorado but feels like the pandemic year didn’t allow him to put his best foot forward.
On Monday, the state announced schools could reopen. Javin, who had spent the day snowboarding, made
it to practice for the good news.
Barefoot and eating a bagel,
13-year-old Graciela Leahy settles in front of her iMac for a stretch of nearly six straight hours at her bedroom desk.
Her parents invested their first pandemic money from the government to create separate rooms for Graciela, an eighth grader at Ohio’s Columbus Gifted Academy, and her younger sister.
Graciela’s mom, Elisa Leahy, is quick to point out the privilege of having such flexibility, noting friends in Columbus’ immigrant community who have more challenging circumstances or primarily speak Spanish had a harder time navigating the transition.
Still, there are hiccups. In Graciela’s band class — now
mainly music theory — the instructor yells at his cat and takes attendance, wondering aloud why a quarter of the class is absent.
Her English teacher is out with COVID-19, so another oversees the reading of “Romeo and Juliet.” A classmate holds a baby brother during history class, where the teacher’s efforts to keep students’ attention include a video that imagines Napoleon Bonaparte playing “Let’s Make a Deal” over the Louisiana Purchase.
At 11 a.m. Angelina Mistretta spins fidget toys as lessons stream through headphones, keeping her hands busy in hopes her mind will engage, too.
When in-person school stopped, the expectations that come with attending City Honors High School in
Buffalo, New York, did not. On the 16-year-old junior’s schedule this year are International Baccalaureate literature, AP history, Algebra 2, an IB French class and an IB biology class.
The trouble is, her focus has been affected by anxiety and “a severe case of I don’t want to,” she says. A $25-a-session tutor helps with algebra, but she’s also behind in two other classes.
These days, her mother, Wendy, works beside Angelina on the living room couch. Each day Angelina must complete that day’s assignments plus one makeup task.
“There’s definitely a fatigue that’s setting in for all of us,” Wendy Mistretta said. “It’s exhausting doing this work day in and day out. And there’s a mental exhaustion when you don’t know how or when it’s going to end.”
In a pandemic-wracked year, religious leaders and spiritual counselors across the U.S. ministered to the ill, fed the hungry, consoled the bereaved. Some did so while recovering from COVID-19 themselves or mourning the loss of their own family members and friends.
At times, they despaired. So many people got sick, so many died, and these faith leaders couldn’t hug the ailing and the grieving, or hold their hands.
For safety’s sake, their congregations were kept away from in-person services for months, but the need to minister to them only intensified.
Amid the grief and anxiety, these faith leaders showed resilience and found reasons for hope as they reimagined their mission. Here are some of their reflections on a trying year.
Losses
In the early weeks of the pandemic, the Rev. Joseph Dutan lost his father to the coronavirus. Days earlier Dutan’s mentor and friend, 49-year-old Jorge Ortiz-Garay, had become the first Roman Catholic priest in the U.S. to die from COVID-19.
Dutan felt grief, fear, even doubt. He mourned his father while consoling the community of St. Brigid, a Catholic church in an area straddling Brooklyn and Queens that had among the highest infection rates in New York City. His grief, he said, made him better able to help others enduring similar pain.
“When they come in for a funeral Mass of a loved one ... I feel I can relate to them, I can cry with them,” Dutan said. “I comfort them and tell them: ‘Things are going to be all right. We’re not alone; we’re in this together.’ ”
In the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles,
Rabbi Noah Farkas said the pandemic’s toll has been particularly severe among the many older adults in his Valley Beth Shalom congregation.
He estimated that 25 to 50 of its roughly 5,000 members lost their lives to COVID-19 — and even more died, predominantly older congregants, “because COVID created a life situation that was untenable.”
Many were isolated in their rooms at assisted care facilities, he said. “There was suicide, drug addiction, exhaustion — all the things you can think of when mental health deteriorates.”
Farkas conducted 20 funerals in January alone, as California was hit by a wave of infections, while always wearing a mask and sometimes a face shield. He was saddened by the inability to hug mourners.
Among the hardest-hit churches has been Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in
New York City. Its leaders say more than 60 members of the congregation of about 800 have died of COVID-19. Almost all were part of the community of some 400 who attended services in Spanish.
Bishop Paul Egensteiner, who oversees Saint Peter’s and other New York Cityarea congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said the emotional toll on pastors has been heavy.
“They couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t take vacation,” he said. “It’s been a great strain — trying to figure out how we’re going to keep people connected, how we’re going to do worship and hospital visits.”
Imam Ahmed Ali of IQRA Masjid Community & Tradition, a mosque and community center in the borough of Brooklyn, sprang into action in late March after a funeral home called asking for his help to retrieve from hospitals
the bodies of people who died of COVID-19 and give them burial rites. Ali was scared of the fast-spreading virus, like others, but he felt a calling to serve God and his religious duty.
He began putting in volunteer shifts of up to 20 hours transporting bodies, putting them in freezers in the funeral home, washing and enshrouding them in white cloth and taking them to cemeteries for burial.
Typically he performs the janazah, or funeral, prayer only a few times a year. At the height of the crisis in New York City, he was doing as many as 20 in a single day, and over about three months, he oversaw or took part in nearly 300 burials in all.
“It was a really challenging time, and it was a great loss for every community,” Ali said. “I pray that we don’t have to see that kind of pandemic again.”
Friendswood United
Methodist Church, in the suburbs of Houston, has been spared a heavy death toll.
But one active member of the 900-strong congregation who did die of COVID-19 was “a pillar of the church” who served on many of its boards and committees and won friends for his good humor and generosity, said Jim Bass, the pastor.
“He was 74 but no underlying health conditions that we knew of,” Bass said. “When he became sick, for us in the congregation it really hit home.”
Adjustments
Like thousands of houses of worship nationwide, Valley Beth Shalom shifted swiftly to online services.
Farkas and his team also launched what they called a “war on isolation,” including a new over-the-phone buddy system to connect isolated people starved of human contact. Volunteers
selected congregation members whom they called at least once a week, and friendships sprang up between 20-somethings and octogenarians.
With no in-person worship, Farkas encouraged community events respecting health guidelines. For the recent Purim holiday, the congregation staged a drive-through carnival in the parking lot with about
160 families taking part. “We’ve learned a bunch,” Farkas said, “but if I had to pick one thing, it’s that we didn’t give up.”
Friendswood Methodist spent more than $20,000 on video equipment last year to provide online worship. In-person services have now resumed, with a quarter of pre-pandemic attendance. Bass said there’s enough room in the 1,100seat sanctuary for adequate social distancing; he encourages worshippers to sing hymns quietly to themselves through their masks.
For Esther Roman, a chaplain at New York’s Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, the pandemic has entailed ministering to one grieving family after another.
She recalled sitting 6 feet from one devastated woman, tears rolling down her masked face as she posed an anguished question to Roman: Why did God let her otherwise healthy, vibrant mother die? The chaplain couldn’t comfort the woman as she would have done pre-pandemic: by holding and squeezing her hand.
“It was one of those moments that I resent the inability to offer support in the many ways that I used to be able to,” Roman said. “I had to try to have my words do the embracing.”
She and others have had to learn to transmit love or support via digital screens and through face shields and masks.
“We all rose to the challenge,” Roman said. “We were drafted into this war.”
SEATTLE — When Seattle’s largest health care system got a mandate from Washington state to create a mass COVID-19 vaccination site, organizers knew that gathering enough volunteers would be almost as crucial as the vaccine itself.
“We could not do this without volunteers,” said Renee Rassilyer-Bomers, chief quality officer for Swedish Health Services and head of its vaccination site at Seattle University. “The sheer volume and number of folks that we wanted to be able to serve and bring in requires 320 individuals each day.”
As states ramp up vaccination distribution in the fight against the coronavirus, volunteers are needed to do everything from direct traffic to check people in so vaccination sites run smoothly. In return for their work, they’re often given a shot. Many people who don’t yet qualify for a vaccine — including those who are young and healthy — have been volunteering in hopes of getting a dose they otherwise may not receive for months. Large vaccination clinics across the country have seen thousands trying to nab limited numbers of volunteer shifts.
It’s raised questions at a time when supplies are limited and some Americans have struggled to get vaccinated even if they are eligible. But medical ethicists say volunteers are key to the public health effort and there’s nothing wrong with them wanting protection from the virus.
Ben Dudden, 35, of Roanoke, Virginia, volunteered at a mass vaccination clinic in the nearby city of Salem on a day off from his part-time job at the Roanoke Pinball Museum. His wife, a nurse practitioner who was administering doses, encouraged him to volunteer in case he could get
vaccinated.
He spent that January day helping people fill out questionnaires, not knowing if he might get the coveted dose.
“It wasn’t an official thing like, ‘Everybody who needs a vaccine come this way.’ I kind of had to ask,” Dudden said.
He got what he was hoping for and still wants to volunteer again.
At the Seattle vaccination clinic, Swedish Health Services considers volunteers part of the state’s Phase
1 vaccination group. About
5,000 have been inoculated, and about 1,000 of them have come back to work again, Rassilyer-Bomer said.
During their shifts, volunteers are handed colored vests matched to their skill level and experience. The majority wear orange for general tasks, which includes sanitizing clipboards, asking people to fill out forms, taking temperatures and monitoring the
newly vaccinated to ensure no dangerous side effects.
Some may question whether it’s fair for volunteers to get to the front of the line for what’s often clerical work.
Nancy Berlinger, a bioethicist at the Hastings Center, a research institute in Garrison, New York, said the bottom line is that volunteers are interacting with the public and there’s nothing wrong with them wanting protection.
They also go through training and other obligations.
“There would be easier ways to game the system,” Berlinger said. “If that was really your goal, this could take more work I think than some other routes I can think of.”
While many volunteer shifts are several hours on weekdays, Berlinger said that doesn’t necessarily mean only people of a certain class or demographic
can sacrifice that much time.
“That could apply to students, it could apply to people who are unemployed, people who are retired. It could be people who are family caregivers,” Berlinger said.
On a chilly January night in suburban Phoenix, retiree Lou Ann Lovell, 67, got the Pfizer vaccine after volunteering from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. at a state-run site at State Farm Stadium, where the Arizona Cardinals play.
Her daughter persuaded her and other relatives to volunteer.
Lovell committed before realizing those 65 and older would be eligible for vaccines days later. Still, she’s glad she did. “For the first time, I felt I was part of something that was really important and big,” said Lovell, who has since volunteered a second time and hopes to do it a third. “You stand there and see all these headlights and
people are just continually pouring in there.”
The stadium and another state-run site in metro Phoenix require a combined 3,900 volunteers a week. HandsOn Greater Phoenix, a nonprofit handling online volunteer recruitment, opens 1,400 to 2,000 spots a few times a week, and interest hasn’t waned, CEO Rhonda Oliver said. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people try to sign up every time new spots open, she said.
Volunteers who have nabbed shifts say they shouldn’t be lumped in with those who believe they’re entitled to a vaccine.
In the Seattle area, three King County hospitals came under fire last month after revelations that donors, board members and some hospital volunteers used their connections to get shots. The King County Council approved a measure calling on state lawmakers and Gov. Jay Inslee to make it illegal to grant special access to the vaccine.
Berlinger said there’s a clear delineation between a connected official and a volunteer at a vaccine clinic getting a shot.
“The volunteers we’re talking about at registration centers are people who are part of the public health effort. They are performing a crucial role,” Berlinger said. “It’s easier to help people who already have privilege. The thing about COVID is we have to push away from that, and we have to say, ‘No, we must allocate vaccine and vaccination.’ ”
Lovell, the retired volunteer in Arizona, said critics should target the healthy 20-somethings she saw trying to get the vaccine the night she volunteered.
“If you want to volunteer, volunteer and work,” she said. “If you say, ‘I don’t want to do that,’ then wait until your number comes up.”