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By Olivia LoPresti ('22)
It’s hard to find the correct adjective to describe this year; maybe “strenuous,” “unique,” or “unprecedented” come to mind. We’ve all adjusted to this new reality during the pandemic, including in the world of education. All teachers, students, and parents have felt the effects of hybrid and remote learning in North Rockland. But fully remote teachers have been forced to adjust the most, and it’s been a challenging journey for them.
For Mrs. Deborah Bassani, a tenth grade English teacher who’s been at NRHS for 30 years, remote teaching has its pros and cons. She finds herself reinventing her pedagogy (academic discipline), while also becoming a more understanding and tech savvy teacher. “It’s much more time consuming than teaching in person,” she explains, but, “the smaller classes allow for more focused student time, I can really figure out if they’ve done the work they should’ve been doing and I can really meet them where they really need me to meet them.” She finds herself breaking down her assignments into “small, measurable goals” to really be as effective as possible. Mrs. Bassani describes the overall experience as a “new and unusual time” that allows her to make her teaching come alive in a digital manner. However, she admits that remote teaching can be isolating, and she misses both her colleagues and her students.
Similarly, Mr. Robert Castro, a mathematics teacher, also finds himself missing personal interaction. He says it can be difficult to gauge his students' understanding and help them individually, since they are talking to a “video representation” of him. He also finds that the personality that he has in his classroom, just doesn’t come across the same way it would in person. “I feel very alone a lot of the time,” he explains, “the daily back and forth with other teachers and colleagues tends to give a sense of we’re all in this together,” but not being in school makes it very difficult. However, while Mr. Castro says he misses the teachers and students and wishes things were different than they are, his great colleagues make the experience a little better.
Mrs. Maria Tonkin, an English teacher, feels empathetic towards her students, as she’s teaching freshmen and recognizes the difficulties of not being able to participate in most sports and activities as well as the additional stress that may be put on students since they are home with their families more. She says that she faced challenges with computers early in the term, but now she can do “so many things with technology that [she] never knew before” and has “progressed a lot.” Mrs. Tonkin says something that many people need to hear, “This is a very, very unusual time in history. I think it is very important that we realize that we are doing well, trying our best to stay safe and to keep everyone in our families and our community safe. Life will eventually go back to normal, but we need to be patient and careful.”
While the shared sentiment among remote teachers is essentially that they’d rather be in school, North Rockland teachers step up to do their best in a challenging time.
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