MS447 Teachers Adapt Brilliantly to Remote and Blended Learning 

By Lila Butterworth 

Remote learning is not ideal, that's for sure. It’s been hard on students, parents, principles, and basically everyone who works or is involved in the education field. But the people who’ve really been hit hard by it, yet still pulled through, are the teachers. They’ve had to take all their lessons that they carefully planned for in person school and convert them into lessons that can be done over zoom or online. In other words they’ve had to always be “building the ship as it sails” as Ms. Pariani, a 7th grade ELA teacher here at 447 said. Not to mention the fact that they only had a few weeks to do it and many have their own families to take care of.

Let’s face it, as Ms. Pariani so perfectly puts it, “Zoom can really be a drag.” 

It really can be and spending a lot of continuous time on it is never fun. For the students, and the teachers. Ms. Pariani says that managing the amount of class time spent on and off zoom has proven to be her biggest challenge, out of the many that come with remote learning. Many teachers try to limit the class time spent on zoom, but it’s hard because zoom is the only relatively easy way teachers can offer support, answer questions, and teach the lessons. Doing work independently doesn’t work for everyone, some students need or prefer extra support when doing work, and the only way they can receive that is through zoom. Lessons are also hard to understand when they aren’t being taught live, you can’t ask questions or give responses and the teacher won’t know if you understand the material.

Remote learning has changed more than just the way teachers teach lessons, it’s changed the assignments as well. 

“Teaching science remotely has been more difficult because we have to figure out how to adapt the curriculum and all the hands on activities to remote learning, which means a lot of video watching a lot of, hey, try to do this at home,” said Ms. Wong, a 7th grade science teacher at 447 said. 

Ms. Pariani mentioned that she’s been breaking the lessons into small pieces for kids to do independently. “I think it's caused some of our units to move at a slower pace than we might have normally, because we're breaking things up into smaller little chunks,” she said.

While the actual grading system hasn’t changed, we’re living in unprecedented times, as many say, therefore a lot of teachers have made some changes when it comes to their grading policy. 

“I think we've had to take into consideration stuff that might be happening at home that might be preventing students from being able to do what they need to do,” said Ms. Wong, “We're not as strict because we can't be ethically, but in terms of our expectations, the expectations are still the same. So if students are still not doing their work, we're still making phone calls, we're still sending emails and all that kind of stuff.... The deadline has to be extended a little bit for our assignments compared to how it was when we were in normal school.”