Cough Puts Veggie Experiment On Hold

Kevin Sinusas was ready to have his students plant hairy mustard seeds so they could learn some secrets about broccoli, and nature. Then he started coughing. So the plan had to change.

Sinusas was cooking up that wild experiment with his students while teaching an outdoor class at Common Ground High School, where the faculty is trying to make a combination of indoor-outdoor, remote-in-person education work during the Covid-19 pandemic.

After much soul searching, Common Ground reopened for a hybrid of virtual and in-person classes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Being able to switch modes fast, as Sinusas did when he got sick, is a key part of that plan.

“If this was a normal year, I would totally go in and teach sick,” Sinusas said. ​“This eliminates that possible risk altogether. Unlike a normal year, I can teach from home.”

Common Ground has not had any Covid-positive cases this fall or during summer camps this summer. Sinusas does not think he has Covid-19 either; he thinks he caught a cold from a relative who tested negative for the disease.

But students and teachers are supposed to stay home if they have any of the coronavirus symptoms. So he played it safe, switched to distance learning. But that didn’t mean the vegetable lesson was over; it had to evolve.

Similarly, the teachers and students alike have had to be flexible, to shift course, as they navigate the challenge of having at least some education take place in person.

Teaching Under Tents

Sinusas has been teaching science outside on Common Ground’s woodsy campus — one of the key advantages the environment-focused charter school has over other schools during the pandemic. Health experts say that the coronavirus is less likely to spread between people in outdoor spaces where the air, and potential virus particles, that they exhale gets dispersed more easily.

The charter school has set up six tents outside, with labels that correspond to the school’s six best-ventilated classrooms. Each group of students stays in the same two spaces as long as they are at school for the day; the teachers change classrooms when the bell rings.

Sinusas said that the outdoor classrooms bring joy into an otherwise heavy year. Common Ground’s goats bleat in the background and snakes occasionally startle students by joining them for a lesson.

“There is one rogue chicken that wanders underneath students’ desks, to the surprise of students that don’t realize she’s there,” Sinusas said. ​“It pairs the bad side of it being a weird year with a fun side.”

When Sinusas holds classes indoors, it is clearer how much the pandemic has altered school, he said.

“Inside, it is highlighted so much more how unnatural it all is,” Sinusas said.

Is That Mustard? Or Broccoli?

So Sinusas rolls his teaching materials up the hill to his outdoor classroom every day.

He wakes up between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. and gets to school an hour later.

Sinusas had just finished one experiment with his students and moved onto the vegetable evolution project when he got sick on Monday afternoon.

The new project focuses on how to grow the hairiest wild mustard plant. Teams plant wild mustard seeds and then pick the one that looks the hairiest to pollinate with a dead bee on a stick.

The class usually grows three generations and then checks whether the last version is the same species as the first.

The lesson: Humans have been genetically modifying plants for thousands of years, just with less precise technology than today. Broccoli, kale and Brussels sprouts were all created by humans by growing wild mustard plants with larger and larger flowers, or leaves, or buds.

Sinusas teaches in-person twice a week, on Monday and Friday. Because of his cough, congestion and body aches, he taught from home on Friday. Monday is a school holiday for Yom Kippur, so he won’t teach again in-person until next Friday. So instead of starting a new experiment, he asked the students to analyze whether the results of the previous experiment proved their hypothesis.

“We will only get through two generations of these plants now,” Sinusas sighed.

Zoom Squares And Empty Seats

Up to 16 students can learn together at a time, according to Common Ground’s hybrid plan, but some of these ​“cohorts” have as few as two in-person students. The others have chosen to learn via Zoom every day of the week.

Veronica Conde is one of these remote-only students. Conde’s mom, Claudia Arevalo, is pregnant and was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. Because this form of diabetes may be associated with worse outcomes from Covid-19, Arevalo is keeping Veronica and her other kids at home this year.

Veronica worried over the phone about what could happen to her baby sister if she brought the virus home from school. The baby is due in late October and already has a name, Jazmyn, and a nickname, Jazzy.

“If I accidentally got sick and the baby got sick, that would be terrible,” Veronica said.

So Veronica and her three younger siblings are all taking their classes from home. Arevalo is also studying environmental science remotely from Gateway Community College as she pursues a career in environmental engineering. (Arevalo’s love of the outdoors and vision of fixing a planet affected by global warming is part of why she was excited for her daughter to go to Common Ground.)

While Veronica painted a picture of a breezy remote experience, Arevalo let on the level of planning involved from her end. Her two children who have special needs — one has high-functioning autism and the other has attention deficit disorder — study from her bedroom. This way she can check on them between her own classes.

Her 5‑year-old and Veronica are both self-sufficient, so they study from the living room and kitchen.

Veronica said that she does not have any complaints about remote school and that her teachers never forget about the students they see only as squares on Zoom. She just wishes some of her classes were more fun, she said. As a doodler and lover of anime, she was hoping to draw in art class, only to find that the class focuses on analyzing messages in art.

Teachers spoke to the Independent about juggling their remote and in-person students. Sinusas, for example, puts the two types of students on teams. The students on Common Ground’s campus build the experiment while the virtual learners watch from a screen and offer advice.

Being a box on a screen makes it hard for new students like Veronica to connect with their peers. However, Veronica does have a chance to connect with her campus through a new job with the school’s Green Jobs Corps. The position has her pulling weeds and beautifying her own and other school campuses on Saturdays.

All in all, the crazy logistics of making school work during the pandemic is starting to feel normal to Executive Director Monica Maccera Filppu (pictured above). She said that she expected to only have a short period of time in-person with students before Covid cases elsewhere closed all New Haven schools. She is starting to think that won’t be the case.

“It feels more stable than I thought it would,” Maccera Filppu said.