Emily Hays Photo
Sixth-grade teacher Rashana Graham (left): What otherwise takes two days now takes a week.
What Rashana Graham and her colleagues are learning about how best to teach in a pandemic.
Other students had left the virtual classroom, but Graham worked with Joshua until every slide was filled.
The individual guidance is similar to what Graham, a teacher at Augusta Lewis Troup School, would have done pre-pandemic. The online version just takes longer, and she has fewer ways to tell if her students are following along.
“What might take two days in a regular classroom kind of takes a week,” Graham said.
City schoolteachers like Graham have been learning in real time how teaching in a pandemic is different, from the pace to the need sometimes to focus more on skills than on facts.
First quarter grades are out for New Haven Public Schools students. It is the first graded quarter since the Covid-19 pandemic closed schools in March. The district’s Board of Education decided not to count grades during the spring quarter of remote school when not every student even had a computer yet. The exception was that students who had excelled during the pandemic could improve their pre-pandemic grade for the year.
Graham said that the grades she has given her students this fall are not dramatically different from what she gave her students in previous years. The difference is the pace of what she is teaching them.
“I give a lot of days where we just do make-up work,” Graham said. “I did a make-up day and realized that it was my fault that I didn’t give them explicit enough instructions. You think kids know how to do this stuff online and they don’t.”
Graham has also written “no grade” on her students’ report cards more often than ever before.
“Usually everybody has a grade. I have maybe five ‘no grade’s. If I haven’t seen the kid, I can’t grade them,” she said.
Hundreds of students across the district have never shown up to class, and more check in irregularly. Sometimes, these missing students are no longer living at their listed address and no one knows where they are.
Contributed Photo
Candice Burton (left) and her son, Joshua Burton, during his lunch break.
Joshua’s mom, Candice Burton, has seen her son’s grades fall this quarter.
“Remote learning has been a struggle for him,” Burton said. “He needs more one-on-one time. Because he has a learning disability, it’s hard for him to stay focused.”
Joshua seemed to get more individual attention during in-person school, Burton said. He and his sister study from home during the day while their father watches them. Both siblings struggle to focus amidst the distractions of a home environment.
In addition, their home internet connection kept failing, so Joshua kept having to miss classes. Burton said she was able to fix the connection a month ago, and it has been better since then.
Despite the challenges her kids have faced with remote school, Burton plans to keep them home when New Haven Public School buildings reopen for in-person classes.
“I don’t want to risk their safety or health,” she said.
Burton described her son as a sweet 12-year-old with a determined streak.
“Joshua loves so many things. His mind is so full LOL,” Burton said by text. “But I’m very proud that no matter when kids tell him that he won’t be able to do certain things, he tells them, ‘Watch, I got this.’”
“H‑I-N-D-U-I-S‑M”
Google Meets
This past Friday was another review day in Graham’s sixth-grade social studies classroom.
The assignment was to put together a slideshow on different religions, starting with photographs of places of worship and adding facts like who founded each religion.
Graham knew that her previous class had needed a more detailed breakdown of what to do. However, when she asked her students whether they wanted her to go over the project in more detail, she got a chorus of no’s in the class chat. One student said yes and Graham thanked her for taking pity on her when she so desperately wanted to show them some tips.
Graham shared her screen and gave them an example of adding a photograph of a temple to a slide on Hinduism. Then the students got down to work.
A flurry of messages told Graham that four students were done and wanted her to check their work. In between answering other students’ questions, she opened their assignments and told them they had done much better jobs than the day before. Each could log out and have a happy weekend.
Graham then started calling out the names of remaining students and asking whether they had questions. When she did not get an answer, she told Joshua that she was about to look at his assignment.
“Josh, you need to open this document, honey,” she said, after opening it.
She showed him again what to do.
“Josh, let me see you do your first one,” Graham said. “You still don’t have it open. Do you know where to find it?”
“Can I share my screen?” Joshua asked.
Graham said he could and showed him that he had opened the wrong assignment. He followed her directions to open an image search pane within Google Slides and type “buddhism place of worship.”
Google Slides
A grid of Buddhist temples popped up in the pane.
“Choose one. Which one do you like? Nice! Now let’s do the next one,” Graham said. “Now you have to type in ‘Hinduism.’ See it at the bottom of the page? H‑I-N-D-U-I-S‑M.”
They followed the same process for Christianity, Judaism and Sikhism. Joshua kept typing “please” instead of “places.” Graham laughed and asked him to slow down. By the last two slides, he had the process down.
Graham’s next request was that he enlarge the photos rather than just sticking them in the slide.
“I want you to do this nice. You’re almost finished with your project,” Graham said.
On the next slide, Joshua carefully enlarged and centered his photograph. The two finished up and Graham reminded Joshua to click the option to turn in the assignment.
“Good job, kid. I’m proud of you. Good work,” Graham said.
Graham said that the downside of her slower, remote class pace is that she will not get to finish her curriculum. Instead, she is focused on skills like being able to create high-quality slideshows.
“If they have transferrable skills that can they can use moving forward, next year the teacher can fast forward through what we missed. Maybe we might not get to, like, Russia,” Graham said and clarified that she doesn’t know which units will get chopped.
She said that it’s easy to assume students have advanced tech knowledge because they have grown up with tools that seem advanced to her. She sees her daughter creating complicated videos on the social media platform TikTok. Her daughter will cut between scenes, slow down or speed up action, add music, and play two synchronous videos at the same time.
“People are assuming kids know everything because they know how to use TikTok. Some of these kids really don’t know how to open a tab or create an email,” Graham said.
She said that she learned how to make a Powerpoint first, so it seems more basic to her.
“We have to recognize that kids are tech-savvy but they need help with academic technology,” she said.