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.”
Bonnie Jean Schupp, a photographer, writer and retired middle school language arts teacher, died of pancreatic cancer Thursday at her home in Pasadena. She was 76.
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, she was the daughter of Alvin Schupp, a Mercantile Bank trust officer, and his wife, Virginia, a homemaker. Raised on Lyndale Avenue near Clifton Park, she was a 1963 Eastern High School graduate and had a lifelong interest in photography.
She was briefly a teller at the old Progress Federal Savings and Loan and earned her undergraduate degree at Frostburg State University.
A 2020 Capital Gazette article related that while in college, she knew no one and broke a few rules “to become the person she is now.”
“Her parents signed a paper saying she wasn’t allowed to go into town or spend the night outside of Frostburg’s campus. But she did, and she got to know the world and herself a lot better,” the article said.
She married A. Scott Caples, an engineer. They later divorced.
She taught language arts for seven years at Benjamin Franklin Junior High in Brooklyn.
She went on to open Monaco’s Camera Shop with business partner Barry Monaco in Severna Park. She established friendships with her customers. Some were surprised the shop was run by a woman, a woman who knew her way around film jams, shutter malfunctions, lenses and photo techniques.
She also won a prize of $4,000 in the Kodak International Snapshop Awards with a picture submitted through the local newspaper sponsor, the old Baltimore News American.
In 1968 she met her future second husband, David M. Ettlin, a Baltimore Sun staff member, while they both lived in apartments in a Calvert Street rowhouse in Charles Village.
With his press pass, Mr. Ettlin offered to drive her around in his convertible to take pictures of National Guard soldiers patrolling the city amid the rioting that followed the Martin Luther King assassination and uprising.
“It became a 42-year partnership, including what I called a ‘bring-your-own-shotgun wedding’ in February 1980 as our respective divorces were completed,” he said. “My daughter Lauren was born six weeks later.”
Ms. Schupp arranged to photograph the delivery of her daughter at Sinai Hospital.
In a Baltimore Sun article, Ms. Schupp said of her delivery, “To those who argue about the messiness of birth and lack of aesthetics, I say there is nothing more beautiful to a mother than her child just born from her womb. Besides, aesthetics was not my goal but, rather, documentation.”
The photo later won an honorable mention in the Women In Photography International competition.
She and her husband collaborated on feature, travel and circus stories for The Sun, where she also freelanced as an independent photographer. Her photos also appeared in the Baltimore Business Journal.
She sold her interest in the camera shop to her employees and began a six-year run writing the weekly “Camera Bag” column for The Evening Sun. The column also appeared in South Bend, Indiana, and Prescott, Arizona, newspapers.
When the column was discontinued, Ms. Schupp returned to the classroom as a teacher in Anne Arundel County for two years at Annapolis Middle School and 13 more at George Fox Middle in Pasadena. She then became its resource teacher and arranged cultural enrichment activities.
Ms. Schupp, who had a Japanese pen pal in childhood, was selected by the Fulbright Memorial Teachers Fund to travel for three weeks in Japan. She met teachers and learned about the school system.
She and her husband were also members of Servas, an international peace organization, and hosted its traveling members.
Ms. Schupp earned a master’s degree at the Johns Hopkins University. About 16 years ago, at age 60, she received a doctorate in communications design from the University of Baltimore.
“She took her experiences from teaching and did original research on bullying in schools for her dissertation,” said Dorine Andrews, a friend
and writer.
Ms. Andrews also said, “Bonnie was fearless. She dressed to express herself and she didn’t care what people thought of it. She was lucky. She was born with an artistic gene. She could follow through and make things happen. It made her a very complete person.”
She exhibited and sold her photography at the Creative Alliance Big Show and Maryland Art Place Out of Order event. One of her oversized prints hangs in the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center administration building.
She also sold images from an online portfolio of some 2,000 pictures at iStock/Getty Images. Her photos were also displayed on the rooftop digital arts billboard at Charles and Lanvale streets.
Ms. Schupp self-published half a dozen books, including “365 Gifts,” a compilation of a year of photo-illustrated blog postings about a gift that each day brought.
For day 301, she wrote, “Faith is our human condition . ... I drive my car with faith that the truck in the westbound lane will remain there and I walk down the street believing that the person walking toward me will respond to my hello with a nod and a smile.”
A celebration of her life will be held once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.
In addition to her husband, a retired Baltimore Sun night metro editor, survivors include two daughters, Lauren M. Graham of Ocean Pines and FL Ettlin of Bowie; two sisters, Nancy Ayers of Jarrettsville and Jaymie Watts of Jacksonville, Baltimore County; and a cousin, Sandra Schupp of Rosedale.
In his confirmation hearing, Michael Regan failed to demonstrate is a willingness to get tough on polluters, which is exactly what the Chesapeake Bay needs right now.
The headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is located on Pennsylvania Avenue just blocks from the White House and a pleasant midday stroll to the Potomac River, the second largest tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. Michael S. Regan ought to go check out the view. The EPA’s new administrator, handily confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday by a 66-34 vote, could scarcely find a better first-year project to tackle than cleaning up the nation’s largest estuary.
Rarely has there been an environmental project so ripe for federal involvement, and it poses an opportunity for President Joe Biden to demonstrate to all Americans the benefits of regulatory intervention in protecting public health and this country’s natural heritage. It also touches on a wide swath of issues from climate change and rising sea levels to runoff from farm fields and city streets, smart growth and clean drinking water. It has bipartisan support and broad public appeal. What better example to set for skeptical red state communities than to show how the EPA can get things done in jurisdictions open to environmental protection? It’s not unlike Texans learning belatedly of the need to regulate the utility grid against severe winter storms. Your average waterman is politically conservative about a great many things but when it comes to keeping sewage discharges out of waters shared by oysters, crabs and rockfish he’s about as green as any vegan activist that ever marched for animal rights.
As it happens, Mr. Regan was asked briefly about the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program during his confirmation hearing; he made some supportive comments and even allowed that he’s likely to appoint a “czar” to oversee cleanup efforts. What he failed to demonstrate is a willingness to get tough on polluters, which is exactly what the Chesapeake Bay needs right now. It’s clear enough what the problems are. There’s no shortage of studies. What’s often lacking is a willingness to make the sacrifices needed to reduce pollution, chiefly excess nitrogen and phosphorous that ultimately robs the bay and its tributaries of precious dissolved oxygen. Indeed, the biggest vulnerability can be summarized in one word: Pennsylvania. Our neighbors to the north have allowed all manner of pollution in the Susquehanna
River but don’t have to deal with the consequences as it all flows south into Maryland and Virginia.
That’s not really a criticism of Pennsylvania so much as an acknowledgment of geographic and political circumstances. It’s not unlike Midwestern coal-fired power plants that blithely send pollution downwind into Mid-Atlantic states, including ours. It took federal intervention to spur change (and, ahem, more is needed). Maryland can sue (and has), but how much better to have the EPA take its usual carrot and stick approach to prod Pennsylvania into doing better? Mr. Regan surely understands the challenge. Until recently, he was North Carolina’s top environmental regulator. Previously, he worked at EPA under the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations. The real worry is that he’ll be timid. The Chesapeake Bay can’t afford that.
Earlier this month, no fewer than 14 environmental advocacy groups sent a letter to the acting EPA administrator and others demanding more aggressive enforcement actions by the EPA to protect the bay. The real danger, bay supporters recognize, is that the Biden administration will give their cause much lip service but won’t be willing to rock the boat. They’re right. We need some serious boat rocking. And it should start by appointing an experienced and high-profile czar like former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who has both credibility on the issue and a deep knowledge of the region’s political landscape.
Mr. Regan is expected to focus on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in the months ahead. Fair enough. But we doubt he’ll find a project where EPA involvement is more vigorously sought after from local residents of every political stripe than this one so close to his doorstep.