Year 12 – Week 5: Where They Are At

As I watched the chaos of my 5th grader moving to retrieve a pencil, a worksheet, and a clipboard from the front of my classroom, I was baffled. What was going on? It was a mess.

Some students were up in the front of the room looking lost, other students had made it back to their chairs without the worksheet, and other students were taking far too long picking a pencil out of the pencil box. The fact that all of these pencils were brand new and the same made this delay seem even more ridiculous.

This had never happened before with any of my other 5th grader classes.

This year, talking about students as being “behind” and needing to “catch up” is unproductive and ridiculous. Standards for what measures students learning and success were flawed before the pandemic. Now that we are in the thick of the pandemic, calling students “behind” for not doing what students before the pandemic isn't helping build up out students.

At the same time, I fully understand that students have experienced an atypical school for the past two years and that there are things that they haven’t learned and skills they haven't developed.  Students mustn’t feel bad for not knowing things or now knowing how to do something because they are “behind.” It’s not their fault, and we as teachers need to be sensitive to this.

I expected that the students would have challenges singing. This has been true. They are less comfortable singing in a group, aren’t singing as loud, and are learning songs very slowly. I expected that dancing would need work. This has been true. Simple dance moves have been a challenge for the students, so we’ve had re-teach the basics of walking, patting, and clapping to the beat. Last year in music class, we couldn’t sing, and we couldn’t dance around the room. So, the fact that my students need time to develop these skills was perfectly reasonable.

There have been other ways that my students showed me that they need more support. After a school year where they rarely moved around their classroom, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they would need more explicit directions to gather their classroom materials. However, I didn’t see this coming.

Part of being a teacher this year is giving our students space to show us where they are and what they need. Not having a typical school year for two school years will manifest in ways that we expect and ways that will surprise us. The effects of the pandemic on our students will not be fully understood at least a decade from now.

We have to focus on where our students are, help them grow in meaningful ways, and show them a way forward with a supportive hand. Our students didn’t deserve the last two years of school, but they do deserve our best efforts to embrace and celebrate where they are in their lives and let go of where we think they should be.  Only then will be able to help our students focus on who they want to be, and help make this vision a reality.