online to in-person

By Hanna Dang

Being at school during a pandemic is unknown and dangerous territory for teachers and students. Yet, Stephanie Chan, being her second year teaching at YB and teaching overall, is trying her best to continue in-person classes. Now that it is in-person, she can feel the difference.

Ms. Chan: “It's really, really great. I mean I would say like teaching is all about getting to know my students and like being able to connect with them and being like to see and help them with learning, but also with stuff outside of school.”

Her time in online school has left some of her teaching methods forgotten, such as being able to connect with her students. She says that it feels as if she was left in the unknown and believes that other teachers probably feel the same.

Ms. Chan: “I would say it was very different from what I had thought teaching would be like because I couldn’t see faces, it was hard to like, you know see faces and to know who is listening and who was engaged.”

All she could do in online school was sit there and hope students would be focused and listen to her lessons, and she felt like she couldn’t do much. She wants students to be engaged, and it being her first year, she expected there to be more to teaching than just a screen.

With the rise of the new COVID-19 variant, omicron, it is even harder to stay safe, enjoy her time with her students, and stay focused in class.

Ms. Chan: “I think if you talk to a lot of teachers then….just a lot of uncertainty and chaos with the rise in omicron and the fact that we have like a third to half of our students out.”

The fact that many students are missing from the classroom is also a big part of her worries.

Ms. Chan: “ I think it's pretty crazy in terms of trying to figure out like, how do I get students caught up and how to make sure everybody stays on track.”

Students fall behind on work when they are needed to stay home after catching Covid-19. Since they are staying at home, they don’t have the attention and guidance they need to complete their assignments. To top it off, students seem uninterested and too tired to keep up with school and work. As she goes through the year, Ms. Chan tries her best to keep them engaged in school.

Ms. Chan: “I think my hardest moment in teaching...is trying to…connect with students who…don’t feel like school is for them or who don’t love to be in class and aren't turning in homework and don’t seem to be engaged.”

Through all these struggles, there are still some moments she felt hope, which is rare to find in the past years of wearing masks.

Ms. Chan: “Recently we were learning…I think any moment that was good was when I could see that my students were very happy where like, learning something or there is some sort of breakthrough.”

One example, in one of Ms. Chan’s recent classes, two students had worked hard to complete and learn something difficult. Ms. Chan didn’t miss this effort.

Ms. Chan: “there were these two students who did their do-diligence and like asked me a lot of questions and were thinking and researching and they seem to get it by the end of the period and they were very proud of themselves and I was also very happy.”

She also has hope for the students’ future, despite the chaos that COVID-19 has brought to our world. It is very important to keep that hope, especially during this time. Though people may not know it, hope is something that affects everyone.

Ms. Chan: “There are a lot of hopes I have for the future. One of them is I hope that eventually every person will have access to a really great education that not only teachers teach them like the basic fundamentals thing that I think are so important to learn and to life.”

With the hope that we can move forward, Ms. Chan also tries her best to keep things rolling. She says that we have to find a way to keep moving forward, even during hard times. I think that we should also try our best to help teachers like Ms. Chan to try our best to move forward.

For the Warrior times, I am Hanna Dang.