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 third 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. You can read the second part of their conversation here. The final part of their conversation will be released as donor-exclusive content.
“France in XXI century. Future school” 1901 or 1910. Jean Marc Cote (if 1901) or Villemard (if 1910) / Public domain
Each conversation covers several broad topics; you can read straight through or use the links below to navigate.
Student rights: privacy and disability
How to understand this experience emotionally—and historically
The transition back?
B: I heard someone from CDC, I think that was like last week, say “This is still at the beginning. This is not the second wave, this is the first wave.” But it’s hard to wrap your mind around that. We’ve been fairly fortunate to not have like an epidemic like this in some time in the United States. The swine flu 10 years ago, that was far more limited, and obviously AIDS in the 80s and 90s, but that predates me, so I have no living memory of a major pandemic like this. It’s psychologically traumatizing. Obviously if you get sick or you lose someone, this is devastating. [And] the job losses—you know students are going through this, and probably teaching colleagues as well. They might have spouses who lost their job and they might be now like the sole money maker for the family. It’s something that’s going to take a very long time for us to really unpack how collectively traumatizing this was.
In our state, in the very beginning, it seemed to me like it was much more of a unified response. Our general assembly gave our governor sweeping powers to shut businesses down, shut schools down, and he did. He shut the schools down for the entire state and they shut down restaurants and bars, but then, you know, we became the first state to reopen. Since then, it’s been very much a patchwork. Governor Kemp has made it basically illegal for local municipalities and counties to do anything more stringent than the state does, so cities cannot require bars to close if the state doesn’t. It’s been a source of frustration. Keisha Lance Bottoms, who’s the mayor of Atlanta, really butted heads with Kemp publicly about this, what if we want to keep restaurants shut down and the state says no—that’s why right now districts are kind of just on their own.
I mean, I’m sure behind the scenes they’re getting guidance from the Department of Education for the state, but districts basically are in charge of their own calendars. They’ll start when they want. Some districts right now in the metro Atlanta area have one, two-week delays, some don’t. Some are contemplating doing staggered schedules with some students there Mondays and Wednesdays, some there Tuesdays and Fridays. Some are saying “We’re gonna have everybody there every day.” My district is giving students the option. You can either choose to learn at home for the rest of the semester or be in-person.
R: Wow!
B: So I don’t really know what that means practically. Do I have to teach half my day digitally, half my day to students there in the building, film my lessons and just stream them live? I don’t really know what it’s going to look like.
Student rights: privacy and disability
R: And there are those pieces, too, about student rights. That’s why there’s no recording within classrooms.
B: When I got my teaching certification, you know, I had to go through the ed tpa process with the national portfolio. I filmed my classes, like, 10-minute clips, and even for 10-minute clips I had to get parents to sign permission forms for all hundred and ten of my students. If one parent didn’t, I had to position the camera so they could never see that student ever, edit their voice out. When I was having Zoom meetings, I was I was not going to let students show their faces on the camera because I can control what’s in my environment, but I don’t know what I’m going to see in a student’s, and if they’re under 18, I don’t feel comfortable filming them. So it’s going to be a major privacy issue. I’m going to have to get waivers from parents and it’s going to be a headache to like figure out where to put cameras, but at the same time FERPA is a strong federal law. I’m not sure I’d want my child to be taped for the whole world to see.
R: Our district has done a good job with keeping things relatively closed, but a neighboring district was doing their board meeting via Zoom and someone hacked it and was putting pornographic pictures up during the recording.
B: Very quickly our tech team said “Everything has to be private.” You post the link 10 minutes or 15 minutes before, then you delete it. All students have to use their first and last names, you let them enter one by one from the waiting room and you verify who they are. It’s sensible; I don’t want to have my class destroyed through Zoom-bombing. It’s a major privacy issue.
R: Our district was very clear: Do not use Zoom, only use Google Meet. They instituted this policy—through Google Classroom, you can give a nickname to your Google Meet which actually gives it more security. It was kind of nice, because then I could just send the kids the Google Meet name and it deletes it as soon as you’re done. You know, we talk about like health and safety not only of students but staff, but most certainly I think student rights are going to play a part as we move forward.
B: And there’s the students who have IEPs, 504 plans—I don’t know how special education teachers, especially if you have a self-contained special education class, I don’t know what they’re supposed to do.
R: Some of my friends are part of the SpEd department and they have self-contained classes. I mean yes, you can accommodate to an extent, in terms of getting notes, giving extra time, but if you have a student who’s visually impaired and you’re doing everything digitally now—are there things that you can do? Yes, but it makes it even more complicated. My soon-to-be sister-in-law is an [occupational therapist] and she specifically does adaptive technology, and the amount of time and money that goes into ensuring that those college students get what they need—then to also do that at the high school level? It’s hard enough in person; I can’t fathom trying to get them that at home. You need a lot of support from the parents, and if the parents are not able to give that for whatever reason, whether they’re working or they’re not present . . . You want education to be as accessible as possible to everyone and I’m really concerned that in the coming year, there’s definitely going to be a gap that occurs.
B: I dread looking at this longitudinally, at outcomes for students who came through this.
How to understand this experience emotionally—and historically
B: There is that question you asked in an email about aiding students in processing what is happening to them, but also educating them on current events as a strange crossroads. I think that’s a really good question.
R: I feel like there’s no good answer to it. I think for me, being really raw with my students and talking about the struggles that I was going through as a way to empathize with them and let them know that they weren’t alone? I know a lot of my kids really appreciated that. I told them when I had a week that was hard, especially when we were out for two weeks. Sometimes we’ll have a two week break around Christmas, every couple of years it’ll land nicely where you get that two weeks off for the holiday, so the longest I had ever gone during a school year without seeing my students was two weeks. When that Friday hit and I knew I wasn’t going to see my kids on Monday, oh my God, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t do anything, and it was so strange because I didn’t really realize that I was grieving in that way until I experienced it. So, I started telling my students about my stress baking—I was baking so much! I think that in that piece, we were able to commiserate.
I think we talk about how a lot of our kids—we don’t know what’s going on at home for them, right? They come to school as an escape. They have extra stressors at home that we’re not aware of and this situation put them there permanently. I have a student who has [a very difficult situation at home] and that student had reached out to me several times because they used the school as an escape. We talk about the trauma of the event and then, for teachers, we always have the secondary trauma of hearing what our students are experiencing, but then knowing then that they couldn’t even leave situations such as that was extremely difficult for me. It enabled me to become very empathetic with my students in that I was now experiencing a situation where I have additional stressors (as we hear my kid crying right now) while trying to work, while trying to help them, while also, ironically, teaching them history whilst also experiencing history. I think it’s almost surreal when you think about the gravity of that.
I think that there’s a really important conversation to be had about the mental health of students and teachers that has become more relevant lately and definitely more present. In New York state they’re doing a lot more regarding student mental health, but I don’t think we were at the point to fully support kids through something like this. My husband’s a counselor so I could, at least on occasion, get some advice from him, but not all teachers are in that situation. It’s a weird crossroads.
B: I feel in some ways, my historical training kind of failed me. I always felt like I’d find answers in the past. I don’t really find any answers. I know that it’s really easy to always say “Ain’t nothing new in history, we’ve all gone through this, nothing’s unprecedented,” but you know what? That doesn’t really give me any comfort when I’m living through traumatic times. I hate that answer. It’s like “Oh, don’t worry, people have been through worse times.” That doesn’t help me. I’m sorry, that doesn’t give me any comfort. Maybe that sounds selfish? I don’t find any comfort hearing that this happened before. I don’t want to live in extraordinary times. I want to live in really boring, typical times. I don’t want to live through world-changing events because oftentimes they’re very traumatic and they’re not all amazing, and this is an example. I don’t want to live through a combination of the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression at the same time. Like, no thank you, that’s not what I wanted to experience any time in my life.
Students sometimes send me emails like, “Hey, Dr. Cossen, what do you think about this?” I’m like, I don’t know. Honestly? I don’t have an answer for you. I’m best trained to reflect on things that happened in the past, not right now. I’m not a sociologist or a reporter. I’m not a journalist. Maybe 15, 20 ,30 years from now I’ll look back, maybe I’ll have something to contribute, but I’m a living participant in this and I don’t really feel the need to reflect.
When I started off in the shutdown, the quarantine, I had all these grand designs. I was like “Oh I’m gonna write really good historical think-pieces about how this compares to previous pandemics.” I didn’t do anything, because anytime I tried to start, I was just so overwhelmed with developments of the day, especially the first four or five weeks, mid-March to mid-April. Every day with the press conferences, the coronavirus task force briefings, and local media was cutting in. I watched the Price Is Right in the morning and it would get disrupted with “Breaking news! Another thousand diagnoses today in Atlanta!” It was so overwhelming and so much sensory overload that I was like “I have nothing to say.”
I felt the best thing to do in my classes—for instance, I teach comparative government and politics and it’s looking at contemporary political developments in six countries around the world, and most of them are major hot spots. We study Iran and China and the UK and these are all major hot spots of COVID, especially in April, so—let’s let the students take the lead. I assigned them all a different country in groups and they had research what’s actually happening on the ground, how are public health agencies in the country responding, to try to learn something, try to make it like relevant.
And the same with my history classes. We got to the end and we talked a little about COVID, and had the students select a primary source, right now in the 21st century, that people thirty years from now will say is a useful source and the single largest number were COVID-related. That was clearly the most predominant one on people’s mind. So, you let the students take the lead. Anything I can say—I mean, they’re experiencing the same reality I am right now right. I feel like we always talk about “Don’t be the sage on the stage.” Well this is the moment for that not to be the case. I’m not going to stand here and tell you what you need to know about COVID. You have as much access to information as I do right now, so you tell me what’s important about this. I’m no expert in public health, so what can I offer them really?
R: We talk about what tools historians use to write history, right? And one really prevalent thing is journals. I tell kids all the time: you need to pay attention to what you’re writing on social media because you might be that person that everyone studies over and over and over again because of what you posted.
B: I told them that the National Archives archives every public tweet, just continuously, not just public figures, anyone! So if you have a public twitter account, It’s being archived. There’s billions of tweets. No one’s reading them right now, but . . . Students’ minds are blown by this One day, President Trump’s tweets are going to be primary sources in history and political science books. You may laugh at that now, but that’s true. Your tweets, your Instagram posts—they’re public, that is a primary source for the future. And you see the light bulbs go off like, oh my gosh, I’m making history. Yes, you are!
R: Yes, exactly, you were helping write it! I was dying over this thing that was being circulated through social media and someone had tagged me in it—one of my former students had. To be clear I don’t friend any students until they have graduated! So anyway, I had a former student who tagged me in this post and she was like “This is so cute. You should do this with your daughter,” and it was this COVID-19 journal that you can print out and every day you document how you handled like living through the pandemic. And I was like—I don’t want to do that. It was a nice sentiment and I appreciate you thinking of that since I was your social studies teacher, however experiencing it is enough for me right now. Having to—actively documenting it with the idea of either myself or someone else the future going through it. Maybe it’s just like the historian in me, knowing the amount of analysis, that every word might be really focused in on. It was really invasive for me and I was like “Nope, I’m good, I’m okay.”
B: I wish I had encouraged my students to start a journal. I didn’t do that. I feel like I missed the opportunity to do that because I know like are already archival projects that are trying to collect primary sources. In my field, I know there’s a religious history archive that’s being formed for COVID and churches and religious groups in the United States, how they dealt with it, so people are sending in emails from their ministers about social distancing in a religious space. These are great sources that someone is going to write a great book on. I should have told my students to do this, but the closest I came to was the primary source activity: send me what you think are the primary sources of the time. I’m trying to get students to think that way, these are history-making events, because I know they were overwhelmed by it. But I should have encouraged them to do a journal or diary, that would have been a nice thing for them to do. I’ve never journaled, but maybe this would have been the time to do it. Just keep a date book, like in the 1700s, of mundane things: “ate breakfast today,” “washed children’s hands 30 times today.”
R: I think of something as like relevant as—what’s it called? A Midwife’s Tale, the Martha Ballard book. That particular diary for years was just kind of overlooked, and it was it was just dates of certain deliveries and whatnot. What Ulrich was able to with it was it was crazy. Like you said, maybe you should have kept a date book!
B: 200 years from now, you’d be the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, [but] you would never get to enjoy it. That’s the tragedy of people in the past, I guess? I don’t know if it’s a tragedy or not.