Editor’s note: Contingent is fortunate enough to have two talented high school social studies teachers on its board—Bill Cossen and Rachel Eshenour. Earlier this summer, they had a wide-ranging conversation about their experiences teaching high school during the pandemic. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and we’ll be releasing it in four parts—the first three parts publicly, and the fourth as donor-exclusive content.
“The Noon Recess,” Winslow Homer, Harper’s Weekly 28 June 1873. BPL / Public domain.
Each conversation covers several broad topics; you can read straight through or use the links below to navigate.
Prior experience with online teaching
Navigating the technological and socioeconomic gaps
Student and staff emotional well-being; setting boundaries
Meet Bill and Rachel
Bill Cossen teaches at The Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology, a public, specialized STEM school in Lawrenceville, Georgia. He has a PhD in History from Penn State University (December 2016), and began teaching high school during his last full ABD year. He specializes in the study of United States religion, especially the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Catholicism and that religious community’s changing position in the American nation across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Rachel Eshenour teaches at West Senior High School in West Seneca, NY, a suburban school district outside of Buffalo. She has a BA from Fredonia State University in History and Social Studies Adolescence Education, an Advanced Certificate in Teaching Students with Disabilities from Medaille College, and is dual certified in Social Studies and Students with Disabilities Grades 7-12. She has an MA in History from the University of Buffalo, where she examined infanticide and changing gender roles in Civil War-era Connecticut.
Prior experience with online teaching
Rachel: So, prior to having to go to remote learning with COVID, did you have any other online teaching experience?
Bill: Never a standalone online class. I mean, I’ve used online learning platforms from my first time teaching in grad school up to the present, but always just sort of as an adjunct to the in-classroom experience. So, I’d put my lecture notes and PowerPoints [online] and it’s always assignments and resources for the students, but it was never an actual online class. The most experience I had in any kind of sustained online teaching—in my school we have a thing called “Cyber Days” twice a semester, which gives us experience teaching a fully-online class, but it’s just for two days at a time—once in the fall, once in the spring—and then my entire district has, for the past couple of years, really prioritized using digital remote learning for inclement weather days so we can preserve our calendar. Otherwise we might have to extend the school year or use our snow makeup days. We’ve had to do that a few times, but I’ve never done it for more than three days at a time, and no one else in my district has either, so this was the only time we’ve ever gone beyond three days—and we had to do it for 43.
We all had knowledge of the learning platform; it’s a proprietary one from our district. And our district provides us kind of a whole run of other resources too—Zoom licenses and Google Classroom and then our own learning platform—so we had kind of a full array of digital tools at our hands. It was just a matter of figuring out how to use it most effectively and in an engaging way for almost a quarter of the school year. Nine weeks, it wound up being.
So, I had really minimal experience. I was familiar with all the tech tools themselves, but as far as putting together almost an entire course? That was something we basically had to do kind of on the fly. We had good training on an ongoing basis from our district and also from our own school’s tech team, but it was still a very steep learning curve, even with the kind of experience I had before. What about you?
R: So I had a lot of training prior to this, either through the education courses that I had taken or just experimenting. Our district does a really good job of offering courses that get us our extended credit hours that we need to keep our licensures, and so I had dabbled quite a bit in online learning but I had not really applied it to the classroom other than, like you said, posting things online for your students. I try to make everything I do in my classroom in a format where I can easily post it, because with seniors, you know, they have a lot of life going on. Sometimes I would have some kids out for an extended period of time and they would need to get themselves caught up, so it was a really easy way for me to do that by posting all of that online. I’m a huge advocate for in-classroom learning and so when this happened, it was the complete opposite of what I was accustomed to—completely.
R: And our district is very supportive of using technology in the classroom, but we are by no means a district where it’s our primary means of educating our kids. There are other districts in the area where kids have a one-to-one device but that’s not the case in our district. It will be next year, especially in light of everything that happened. We had so many kids who needed that access to that technology, either because they only have one device at home and there’s four kids and the parents who need to work on that device, or they just—their families didn’t have the money for it, so it really showed us the socioeconomic gaps within our district as well.
I think it was definitely a shock on a lot of levels. I wouldn’t say that we were unprepared. I mean you can’t really prepare for something like this, but I would say personally I was not ready for it and I don’t think it was the district’s fault.
B: I don’t think anybody really could be. In my school we have one-to-one laptops for the students. It’s a STEM school, so it’s kind of an expectation that they were all up to date on innovative pedagogical technology, but not everybody in the district has one-to-one. I’m not sure any other schools actually do.
I think our district worked really hard to get students laptops, but that still presumes they have internet at home and not everybody does. I think even among my students, they may all have a laptop, but [that] doesn’t mean they actually have a reliable internet connection. Even sometimes just on a temporary basis, there were times or days where wi-fi was out for parts of their county for twelve hours and there’s a test that day, so what do you do? That’s kind of where you have to be as flexible as possible with deadlines and test administration.
I hope that districts are prepared for this, because I was reading—a different district, not mine, but also in the metro Atlanta area—I was reading an article a couple of days ago about this when parents were expressing concern that their kids have laptops and the district acknowledged: “We might not be able to get everybody a laptop.” I don’t know what you’re supposed to do at that point, other than give the students printed-out packets of materials, but at that point it almost seems like it becomes a correspondence course.
I think sometimes we get so hung up on “you have to have the most innovative technology.” Even a chalkboard is technology. But what I think in-person is—essentially you have to have that kind of human element. You can’t really reduce teaching to just a recorded lecture, you miss the give and take. Even if you have a synchronous Zoom meeting with the class, it’s still difficult if you have 100 people in there. I mean, I teach 130—unless I was going to break them into four different class periods, but I couldn’t. We had to share our Zoom times. And if they all showed up, how am I supposed to see who’s raising their hand digitally? So even if you have the best tech tools and you have really good facility with them, there’s still major challenges.
You know, it’s one thing if you plan for this months in advance, knowing you’re going to teach in the fall digitally. But when you have to start this three days later, like in our case? No matter how good I am at this, it was still really challenging.
Student and staff emotional well-being; setting boundaries
R: One thing our district did a good job of is that piece about focusing in on the students’ and also the staffs’—they were really concerned with our well-being and making sure that we weren’t overly overwhelmed, because it was shocking, not just for the kids, but also for us. We’re trying to help our students navigate this while also trying to navigate the situation ourselves. You were discussing having flexible deadlines and being, I think more, empathetic to what our kids are going through at home. I think that that became the priority during this whole entire thing, and teaching became secondary. You became more of a support system for those kids.
I also was trying to finish the yearbook, trying to finish certain student council things. It was complete madness. I had the Remind app and that’s how I was communicating with some of my students who were helping me with some of these activities. I had a student who was messaging me at midnight one night, incredibly upset because—we plan a pageant thing. It’s called Mr. West and the winner of Mr. West gets tickets to prom and a free tux to wear to prom and it’s hilarious. The kids worked so hard on it and that was one of the things that was canceled. It’s a huge tradition for the seniors. I had a kid who was messaging me, incredibly upset, asking is there anything that we can do to at least show the hard work that the guys have put into learning all the dances and the choreography and whatnot? I never thought in my teaching career that I would be up trying to comfort a student, messaging them at midnight saying “Focus on what you can control instead of what we can’t right now.”
B: One of the most challenging things for me was trying to discipline myself to work under a somewhat-regular schedule, because the temptation was for me just to stay on the computer until like 9 or 10 at night and respond like every student email if they came in. There were days where I would be on the computer for 13, 14 straight hours and people were saying “You need to tell students that [you’re] not responding after 5 p.m.” But I felt a sort of guilt. I think that’s very common among teachers. We’re not really “on the clock”—even if the school day’s done at three, not really. I feel a real personal sense of responsibility. If the student emails me and says “I have a real problem with this assignment,” if I’m on the computer and it’s 10 P.M. I’m still gonna respond. I think that a lot of teachers—it’s pretty routine to do that.
Parenting and teaching
R: I think this past year was the first time I had only one prep. I usually have two. Especially having a three-year-old at home—and you know because you have younger kids at home—you have to, at some point, draw that clear boundary of “Okay, I’m not going to work during these set hours.” Because that’s exactly what happens. Or, you bring work home and it doesn’t happen—the number of times I’ve had papers that have just taken a nice little ride in my car! Our school day starts at 7:30, so over the last couple of years, I usually get to the building around 7, work for that half an hour until the kids show up, then I work non-stop either teaching, planning, or grading. I take my lunch but that’s it. I just go the whole time. Our day ends at 1:45 and teachers are expected to be there until about 2:30 2:45-ish, but I’m usually there until 4-ish and then I go and pick up my daughter. I have a very concrete day and then COVID shows up and my concrete day was out the window.
Even though my husband was home, he was expected to be on the computer working from eight to four, so I was planning for an hour here or 15 minutes here, or answering six emails here or there. My schedule was completely thrown out the window and my gosh, the sanity that I had created through having structure in my life was completely gone. I’m not sure what you guys did with your kids, but I was trying to do activities with my daughter to help with the writing and the reading skills—not that she really has those skill sets, just developing them. The mental toll of that was so hard.
B: My wife worked for the first few weeks of the shutdown—she’s a physician—and then eventually her clinic closed too, and she’d be home most days as well. So we’d have two adults here which definitely made things more manageable. My daughter was in PreK and they had quote-unquote lessons. It was just a series of six or seven activities throughout the day and we do those in the morning and kind of keep some sense of normalcy. We did her morning school routine, let her do the morning news announcements like she would do in her classroom and stuff like that. My son is daycare-age and they would have a daily story time for 20 minutes to try to occupy them. We’d do what we could to give them learning activities, but at the end of the day, it was definitely not six or seven hours. It wasn’t approximating anything that they would normally get.
The one thing that made it really difficult with child care was just how unpredictable my kids are. Some teachers in my building were able to do live lessons with their students every day, synchronous. I could hardly ever do that because I could never guarantee my children wouldn’t need help with the potty or didn’t need a drink or just wanted to run through and disrupt things or have a screaming match with each other. For the most part I had to just record my lectures.
And I tried to shorten them so it’s not going to be an hour straight of me talking, but also trying to also put in “Okay, watch this lecture for 15 minutes and then take this quick reading quiz and then do this group discussion forum.” I was only able to do live lessons at very specific times when I knew my wife would be home, and it was basically just for AP exam review, three or four weeks before the exams. That was kind of one area I thought was really sacrificing, just because I really can’t gauge my students’ opinion. I would periodically just write to some students randomly: “Hey what do you think of the lesson so far?” to try and get a read of different students across my different classes. That was basically the best I could do. Having to watch kids at home makes it almost impossible to do dedicated synchronous lessons. I don’t really know if there’s an easy fix for that.
You can read Part II of Bill and Rachel’s conversation here. You can read more about how the pandemic is shaping education here and here.