Interview with Darcy Lewis, History 150 Spring 2022, Conducted by Laura Crouse, March 18, 2022
Overview:
Schools closed for two weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 13, 2020, and then moved fully online for the rest of the year. The World Health Organization officially declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
Teachers and students had to quickly adjust to this change and adapt to online learning. Teachers had to come up with new ways to keep their students engaged and focused and students had to find new ways to learn.
Vaccines became available in December 2020, yet schools remained online. The 2021 school year started with some schools choosing to stay virtual and some schools gave a hybrid, half virtual half in person, learning option. These new learning situations were especially challenging for special needs students. The pandemic is still very active in 2022 but most schools are back in person.
This interview focuses on what it was like to be a teacher during the covid-19 pandemic along with the difficulties transitioning to online school as well as back to in person learning. The themes in this interview connect with many on this website including education, covid, teaching, and elementary education. Because covid is still a relatively new topic, there are only a few other interviews that are similar, but they all have the overarching theme of changes in education. The interview also explores how the pandemic affected student’s learning and education. The interview was conducted a little more than halfway into the 2021 school year in a district where the schools are fully back in person.
Biography:
Darcy Lewis was born on February 5th and is from Pennsylvania and uses she/her pronouns. She went to college at JMU for her bachelor’s degree and continued her education at Wake Forest where she earned her master’s degree in chemistry. She then got a job teaching chemistry at a private school in Fairfax called Foxcroft and then moved to Broad Run high school, also teaching chemistry. After she had children, she retired from teaching. As her children got older, she began to substitute teach. She returned to teaching full-time as a special needs assistant at an elementary school in 2017 in Loudoun County.
LC 0:04
All righty. Okie dokie, is it working?
DL 0:22
I hear you.
LC 0:23
Amazing. Alright, I guess we’ll get started. Alright, so my first question is, what was the hardest part of moving to online school?
DL 0:38
Well, the hardest part was taking the kids who were so used to being together and bringing them on the computer and teaching them the etiquette that they can’t talk out that you have to mute your mic, or turn on your camera or turn on your mic. So there were a lot of learning, steep learning curve for the kids, even though you know, they catch on faster, but they had to just learn how to behave differently, and wait their turn or not yell out and also not have conversations with their buddy, while the teacher is trying to talk.
LC 1:28
Right. My next question is, How has COVID changed the way you and your colleagues teach?
DL 1:36
We’re back in school now. But we do tend to mix it up a little bit with more, looking at the promethium board [an interactive whiteboard onto which you can project images from a computer, tablet, or external camera] more. And we, we have we do worksheets and things like that. But I think we’ve transitioned a little bit more to technology where they pull out their computers, they have their playlist, which is kind of a list of things that they can do while we’re doing reading groups or math groups. And that’s computer driven. They have their slides, slide show, the slide deck, and the Promethean board has really become the kind of the focus of the room.
LC 2:25
Cool. Um, how do you think your students have adapted to that change?
DL 2:34
I think they’ve done well. There are, there’s always going to be some kids who are just the kids who need their, they need the verbal instruction, they need the writing aspect more, but most of the kids are adapting well to looking up at the Promethean board, looking at the examples coming up and you know, writing on the Promethean board and on doing things like that, I mean, it’s a really kind of look at it, it’s like the modern day chalkboard. But I think for the most part most kids have, have really come out of it with some good skills.
LC 3:22
Interesting. All right, um, what has been the most challenging aspect of transitioning back to in person school.
DL 3:33
We first got back, we had the shields, we had these plastic shields that you could see through but they were still high. We had the desks separated, we had couldn’t use the coat racks and couldn’t, you know, we had to make sure the kids came in and separated and sat down at their chair and kept their stuff at their, and then next to their desk, we put another chair because we really had half the kids it was a hybrid model. We sat the backpack down. And that was challenging because a lot of the kids they couldn’t see if they’re in the back of the room to try to see through their shield and then see around other shields or do whatever they needed to see the front of the room. There were always the kids in, the poor kids in the back, were like well move your desk a little bit over here or maybe stand up and that was a challenge. The kids were a little fearful, you know, they’re coming in they’re, we’re told you know that that’s very contagious and do all this stuff. And so they’re coming in and a couple of them, you know, had double masks on. And some of them wouldn’t eat, eat their snack, because they didn’t want to take their mask off, just kind of challenges like that. But again, as we got into it, kids adapted and felt more comfortable. We never really did solve a good problem for kids in the back who couldn’t really see through the shields. Now, thankfully, this year, the shields were down when they still had their masks, but we didn’t have to have the shields. So that was, that was definitely a challenge.
LC 5:32
All right, did they come back with less social skills, because they were online all the time?
DL 5:39
Um, social skills, they were excited to really see each other the skills depended on their grade level, you can see different aspects of things. Now, if you’re working with like kindergarteners, or first graders and things like that, you know, the social skills, they could always talk to their, their friends, but, you know, the idea of waiting, the teacher is talking, you’re not talking, you know, things that you always need to teach the younger kids but it was pronounced because they were just used to being on the computer and just hitting a mute button or whatever, and just talking whenever they wanted to, getting up whenever they wanted to, getting water whenever they wanted to. Ah, so and even at throughout this year, the younger kids, some of them are still struggling with the idea of being able to sit for, you know, 10-15 minutes while the teacher is talking. So, um, and then, yeah, I guess getting back into talking with kids who weren’t in their classroom, because last year, you know, you could only hang out with the kids in your classroom because they wanted to make sure that if something happened, they could trace it. So yeah, I think they’re a little bit of a little bit of a deficit from them being home for a year.
LC 7:22
Yeah, um, has it affected the way they learn, they learn differently, now that they’ve had that year online?
DL 7:30
Um, well, it goes back to how we are teaching them. Um, I think that they are more inclined to want to do a computer game or the Prodigy or the mainly it’s a, it’s, excuse me, I hear a lot of can we play prodigy [a math game for students]? Um, do they maybe attention span maybe needs to be built back up but they are pretty resourceful and will go with the flow. So a lot of the younger kids I think, because we had to expose them to the electronics and the and the computer in kindergarten and first grade, which we didn’t do as much before COVID I think now are like well, when are we going to get on the computer? Or when are we going to play this game or that game? So that could be a little different.
LC 8:47
Um, how have you felt about the new regulations that came with bringing students back to the classroom?
DL 8:58
Um, you know, coming in for the first time, you don’t know you it was I guess it was good that you know, you were cautious and doing all those kinds of things. But as you know, as the time the days were on, you kind of see well, we really don’t need this but we, you know, like the shields or whatever, but we have to use them. It’s hard for kids little kids especially to not get close to their buddies or not, you know, when they’re talking with their friends, and that was a hard a hard thing to keep them separate. You just and then in the lunch room, you had these, we had stickers, they were they had to sit on a sticker, but they would do that. But as they were talking and just being kids, you’d go in and like “Wait a minute guys! Where, you’re not sitting where you’re supposed to”, and, you know, because they had scooched over to talk to their friends. But initially, I’m just I was just glad that they found a way to bring the kids back. And it was nice from a standpoint of the hybrid model where the class was so small that I think the kids got a lot of individual attention, which some of them really, really needed. So one day, we had to have kids, the next day, we did the same thing and had the other half of the kids. And I enjoyed that, again, from the standpoint of the smaller classes, and you could manage the kids better. This year with everybody back. It, it’s just like, I guess, quote, unquote, a normal class size, but the smaller kids, you know, the, the easier it is to keep going and to help kids, I think.
LC 11:09
Um, so going back to the time when it was all online, was it difficult to teach from a computer with special needs kids?
DL 11:19
Oh, yes. But it also depends on the kid you’re working with. But it was hard, because some of them if they were upset or something, and they would turn their, their camera off, and you’re going “Uh, hey, so and so where are you we need…”, you know, we don’t know if there’s even there. And then we could do strategies to calm them down, but we’re not with them. So it really depended on what support they had at home, if they were able to have their parents supporting them and if they were on board with what we were trying to do, or maybe there were lots of kids at home, and the parents were stretched thin because they were trying to help all like three other two or three other siblings or children. So yes, I think with some of the kids who needed some special reading or some special math or things like that, and they just didn’t turn their camera on, then it did get difficult to help them or to even realize their progress.
LC 12:35
Allright! Well, that’s the last question I have. Thank you so much for doing this interview.
DL 12:41
Okay, thank you!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Overview:
This interview was conducted over zoom and transcribed with the help of otter.ai after the sound file was converted to MP3. I then went back over the transcript and fixed any mistakes that were made through otter.ai.
Research:
The COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020 when schools closed down and began online. Most schools went back in person as of Fall 2022. I researched the effects that online learning had on students’ mental health, learning abilities, and futures and found that the pandemic had little effect on reading skills but saw a decline in math abilities. I also looked at some ways that teachers were affected as well. Many articles discussed the negative effects that online learning had on many younger student’s future as well as on their mental health. The pandemic saw an increase of anxiety and depression in students as well as created the need for new teaching methods and models. The pandemic also created a need for better access to technology and internet connection. The articles discussed different teacher’s thoughts and opinions about teaching online. I also looked at studies comparing student performances during the pandemic to ones during a typical school year that found a decline in many skills. However, the long-term effects of the pandemic are still unknown. My interview covered the challenges of teaching special needs students, so I also researched how students requiring special learning services were negatively affected to better understand the difficulties that the abrupt switch to online learning had on all students. Lastly, I researched some different solutions to the learning losses that were experienced by different countries during the pandemic to better understand how education is changing due to these new learning situations.
Bibliography:
Ahlgren, Ellinore, et al. “What Impact Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Had on Education?” World Economic Forum, 16 Jan. 2022, www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/global-education-crisis-children-students-covid19/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2022.
Hoofman, Jacob, and Elizabeth Secord. “The Effect of COVID-19 on Education.” Pediatric Clinics of North America, vol. 68, no. 5, Oct. 2021, pp. 1071–1079, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8445757/, 10.1016/j.pcl.2021.05.009. Accessed 21 Feb. 2022.
Kuhfeld, Megan, et al. “How Is COVID-19 Affecting Student Learning?” Brookings, Brookings, 3 Dec. 2020, www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/12/03/how-is-covid-19-affecting-student-learning/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2022.
Transcription Process:
I chose to remove any repeated words to make reading the transcription easier as well as add brackets to clarify any information to allow for a clearer understanding. I kept the majority of the sentences the same so as not to misrepresent the information provided.
Approval:
D.L. approved the transcript on April 19, 2022.
Reflection:
After this interview was concluded and I looked back on it, I realized that I could have asked more questions about gender and being a woman in education that structured some of her work life around family. During a follow up conversation on April 25, 2022, we talked more about her specific students and their special needs that changed through the pandemic. One student in particular struggled to keep his camera on and staying focused while at home. When school was back in person, many students had to relearn and remember basic classroom conduct like staying in seats and raising hands.