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. This is the second part of that conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can learn more about Bill and Rachel and read the first part of their conversation here.
From Health and the school; a round table by Frances Burks Newman and Jesse Dismukes Burks, 1913
Each conversation covers several broad topics; you can read straight through or use the links below to navigate.
The transition to remote learning
Keeping students engaged
R: I was in a very similar boat to you, and that was one of the things I was going to ask you is how you navigated [synchronous lessons and childcare]. Similarly to you, I had friends who have either older kids or they don’t have kids and so they were able to do: “This class comes on at this time, then this class comes on at this time,” so on and so forth. Whereas I kind of threw doing units out the window. I just had my students pick themes each week and so I would base everything that I would teach them that week around that theme.
One of them was supply and demand and the toilet paper crisis. Unfortunately, everything that we were doing in economics—it’s kind of sad, because we’re experiencing everything that we’re talking about right now, but it does lend itself to basing the course entirely around current events. I let the kids pick the current event of that week and then I would base my economic lessons around that. Thank God for YouTube! I found a lot of YouTube videos that corresponded with the lesson for that week, and then I tried to find articles that had various opinions on that particular topic. For supply and demand, I found one that was very capitalist, “The government should not intervene,” “Price gouging is a thing but it’s fine,” “It will balance itself out,” etc., etc., to help them not only learn the concepts of supply and demand but also see the real life application of it. I think that that helped with keeping my kids engaged, because I then switched it over to doing some personal finance stuff for a couple of weeks and I saw a definite drop-off in interest and I switched it back over and they were back into it. I definitely learned what materials kids are more into when they’re working at home and being self-motivated.
In terms of doing live lessons—I actually didn’t do any live lessons and I didn’t record any lectures. What I did was I offered office hours each week. Similar to what you were saying about how you were trying to work it out with when your wife would be home, I tried to do the same thing, although there were many times when my husband then started going back to work part-time and then was expected to be in the building full-time, even though he was full-time working either here or at home, and speaking of random noises, what’s going on?
[Brief interlude to address kitchen noises.]
Basically, it would just kind of be a crap shoot and then sometimes I would have office hours open but I would have to reschedule them because something came up or my daughter was having a bad day, that type of thing. There was one time where I was on and I forgot to post the actual link so it wasn’t until 45 minutes into my office hours and I was like “Oh my God!” So you just kind of live and learn and there are these trial and error moments and you just really learn to be flexible as an educator through all this.
AP Exams and content coverage
B: It was it was the same experience for me. I teach all AP classes and the vast majority of my students want to take an AP exam so there’s definitely an expectation I’m going to prep them for the test. This year, for all of the courses, the College Board reduced the amount of material that would actually potentially appear on the exams. Like, U.S. History, it was basically everything from the beginning up to 1945, and then nothing beyond that would be testable. Essentially “Where would most teachers in the country be done mid-March?” and they said “Around 1945.” So that was nice. It gave us an opportunity to really narrow down students’ studying, but at the same time, our administration—and I’m definitely on their side of this—they said “You know, you’re not here to teach to the test, you’re here to give them a college-level experience, so teach right to the very end.” So I did, and I told the students that. “I’m going to give you test prep, but as an historian, I’m not going to just be mercenary about this and say ‘We’re stopping right now just to maximize your scores.’ I also want to teach you, and I think colleges have an expectation you’ll learn the whole curriculum.”
So I kept going. I kept the unit structures going and I was able to actually cover all the way up to 2020 in the course. I’ve never been able to do before and I thought about this because the other teacher in my building who teaches AP U.S. History too also got to the end and we thought “How did we do this?” I said “Well, there’s no there’s no disruptions when you’re in a totally controlled environment filming a lecture.” But then what do you sacrifice? You sacrifice the give and take of student discussions and question and answer. I mean, I am answering questions—it’ll be through emails, [but] I’m still answering questions. But you really do lose a lot.
Also, in the classroom you have all these different transitions that you don’t have [online.] The students experience them when they’re doing online learning, but as a teacher, I have no more transitions. It’s just: “Here’s my lecture and then here’s my activities for you to do on the learning platform.” I was able to cover more content than I ever had before, but I don’t know what I sacrificed. I mean, I think quite a bit in terms of the social element of students being able to talk to each other and ask questions and go back and forth and all of the knowledge production that happens through spontaneous question and answer sessions, so I’m still working on trying to figure out how to do that a little bit better in the fall, when I’m sure there’s going to be some element of digital learning.
But I did finish the course but it was it was a strange way of doing it from other Comparative Government and U.S. Government courses. Those are not chronological—those are thematic—so I really had to cover everything. But I think the one major advantages of teaching in the South is that we start so much earlier than the rest of the country. Our first day of school last year was August 5th, so by the time digital learning began, I was really almost done. I had already gotten way past 1945. I think when spring break hit, which was the first week of March, and I think I was probably in the 70s or something. So I was way past the end of what College Board said, and the same with U.S. Government, I had finished thematically. I was already planning on stopping teaching and doing AP exam prep last week of April anyway, so it was just—that’s one of those advantages. A month before Labor Day, we’re already teaching, so in terms of content coverage, I was pretty much already done. I think that was the case for a lot of AP teachers in my school. Then College Board pushed the AP exams back one week, so they gave us an extra week to review. In terms of the calendar it really couldn’t have worked out better for us.
The transition to remote learning
B: We also started on a three-day weekend, so we got one extra day to prep for digital learning the following Monday, and then we had spring break two weeks after that, so we had a week off to kind of decompress and regroup for the final push to the end. That’s just the way our calendar worked out in Georgia, and it was stressful, but it could have been worse.
R: See, that’s really interesting because thinking of it geographically, being up in New York state, first of all our school year starts a month after yours. I never taught an AP course, but I taught U.S. History my first year at this job and, oh my gosh, I just remember scrambling to get through to the 2000s. But I also think it’s interesting to talk about the prep time. So did you guys leave that Friday knowing you wouldn’t be back on Monday?
B: Yeah, so we left on Thursday, because Friday was just was one of those severe weather makeup days. We never used any this year, so it was just basically just another holiday. Another district in the area—I want to say it was either Atlanta Public Schools, which is the big district in the city of Atlanta, or it might have been Fulton, which is the other big school district in the city—they had already started closing. They had two schools that had a positive Covid test with a staff member. So at that point, we were all thinking it’s only a matter of time. I mean, I’m Gwinnett County but it’s part of the metro Atlanta area—there’s no way we’re going to avoid this in these counties right next to each other. Our local administration said: “Prepare yourself for the for the potential of not being here on Monday, bring home any materials you need, bring home your computers, lock up your classroom just in case, take anything you need because you might not be able to get back in the building easily if we shut it down.” So we were at least prepared for the potential. It’s hard to remember.
We left on Thursday, and I want to say it was probably that evening they said “Yeah, we’re gonna be closed until spring break” and then they said “After spring break we’ll see” and then we got to spring break and they said “Yeah, we’re gonna be closed until the end of April,” and then the governor just closed the schools for the rest of the school year. So it was kind of bit by bit, every couple of days they’d go further and further. I was kind of pessimistic about us going back, so I was ready for the long haul, mentally. I was just seeing the numbers everywhere else in the country, [and] Atlanta’s got a major airport, I just had this this idea in my mind that we’re probably closed for the year. I prepared for the worst and it wound up being the reality, so I was I at least somewhat mentally ready for this.
R: We received an email, again, kind of that unofficial “Hey, just you know this might be happening,” but it was after the high school’s day had already started, and so some teachers were teaching during the time when they were like “Hey, you might want to send your kids home with some extra work.” And we have every other day block scheduling, so it wasn’t even like I was going to see all of my kids in one day.
On that Friday, we got that email and then—I can’t remember if they had pre-planned this meeting. I think we had a union meeting already scheduled that day, but our principal wanted to talk to us before our union meeting, and so he sat us all down and was like “Okay, so here’s the situation: we don’t know when they’re going to end up shutting down schools but we think that this is going to happen.” I mean, we’re New York state, and we were watching it slowly come across the state, county by county. I think it was that weekend, Erie County had a couple of positive tests. It’s crazy how quickly it spread across the state. So they had already partially shut down—I don’t want to say shut down, they had restaurants and bars having a limited amount of people in them. I don’t know if you know this about Buffalo, but we’re a very big Irish town, and that was St. Patrick’s Day weekend, so let’s just say that I don’t think that everyone followed the guidelines, which just lends itself to further spreading of the virus.
Sunday—I still remember, I was over at my stepsister’s house and I asked if we could put on the news because I had heard that they were going to be making an announcement about where the state was and I think the governor said—oh, it’s amazing how quickly all this becomes fuzzy!—I want to say the governor announced a few days before that that by county they could make the decision or by district they could make the decision to shut down the schools, and then that day a bunch of New York City schools shut down, which makes sense because it was already so widespread in New York. Then by that Sunday, Mark Poloncarz is our Erie County executive, and he came on and basically said “We’re shutting down schools for a month.” I mean, I was just kind of flabbergasted. And our district—I don’t think every district did this, but our district, again, they were really good about preserving the mental health of both the staff and the students—they gave us a week: “Just wrap your brain around this, start your prep work, and then start teaching again the next week.” So they gave us a week to kind of prep everything, make sure the kids had technology, to really have everybody get on firmer ground.
Then it was really interesting, because we were given the one month, and then we would be told a week or two before we’re going to go back, we’ll they’ll announce whether or not we’re going to go back. So then it was extended by two weeks, and they extended by another two weeks, and then I can’t remember if they did another two weeks or whatnot, but at some point they finally said “we’re shutting down for the rest of the year.”
So for a while there, I was doing phone calls home to get kids online because even though we were like “Okay, this week we’re gonna go online,” you didn’t have all your kids in your Google Classroom at that point. So I was talking to a lot of students and a lot of parents. I had a lot of parents who were like “Okay, but what are they really saying to you?” And I was like, “Exactly what you’re hearing. We are all on the same page.”
B: Yeah, that was actually my experience too. What we were hearing was basically what the district was telling the press as well. We were getting the exact emails that parents got, exactly the same, word for word. I think parents like really realized there’s no—we’re not getting some inside information. Usually we’re finding out the exact same time as everybody.
R: The governor decided that we would teach through our scheduled spring break which is in April, and I believe the reasoning behind that was because that first week not everybody was teaching, so that was to make up for that time, which makes sense. It’s funny how I’m like “Wait, what did some districts do versus what did we do?” I think that also speaks to, like I was saying earlier, the trauma of all of this. This experience was so ridiculously traumatic for everyone—and it’s not over yet, either.
Part III of Bill and Rachel’s conversation will appear tomorrow. You can read more about how the pandemic is shaping education here and here.