Welcome to Pandemic Stories, a living history about the deadliest pandemic outbreak of the last century.
In today’s edition, we speak with education professionals who are doing their best to mitigate the damage that the closing of schools is having on children across the country.
If you have a story you want to share, email me at JordanZakarin@gmail.com.
When School Is the Last Line of Defense
Kerri Thornsbury lives in Brooklyn, where she works in the office of a middle school run by Achievement First, a public charter school network that serves largely underprivileged and minority students. Like the rest of New York City, her school shut its doors on March 16th to combat the spread of coronavirus, a necessary move that nonetheless created another hardship for a community that is being devastated by the pandemic.
Last week, the school set up virtual learning for the rest of the year, and to ensure the children had what they needed to participate, the faculty called each student’s home and spoke with their families. The calls also served as a way to touch base and assess how the school community was handling the quarantine, and while it wasn’t necessarily a surprise to her, what Kerri found was still troubling and sad.
“Many parents are out of work right now because they work in factories, restaurants, construction and service jobs that have been shut down due to COVID-19,” she tells me. “One family I spoke to last week said they couldn’t pay their bills or buy food because both parents are out of work. They have 4 kids. Another family I spoke to is undocumented and both parents are sick and they are afraid to go to the hospital because they fear deportation. On top of that, they are both not working right now because they’re sick.”
This particular confluence of terrible events and pre-existing disadvantages is threatening to crush a large number of the school’s families, with the circumstances especially dire for undocumented immigrants, who aren’t eligible for any of the relief money being offered by the federal government. These are the communities that always go ignored in both news coverage of disasters and the subsequent recovery efforts, and the coronavirus pandemic is proving no different.
Determined to help, Achievement First is stepping in to service its communities wherever possible. Right now, the network is running a fundraiser for its communities in New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. All of the money donated will go directly to families in need, making it a very worthy cause.
You can Donate HERE.
Zoom into Science
Melody Serra is an educator based in San Francisco, where she now teaches software engineering to college-age students at a local non-profit. She’s been conducting her classes online since mid-March, when the shelter-in-place order shut down schools across California, and with more time on her hands at home and a new knack for internet-based instruction, she now teaches children about science in new twice-a-day classes broadcast over Zoom.
I caught up with Melody yesterday to chat about her career as a teacher and how the new classes, which she started on a bit of a whim, are going. Read our conversation below the adorable screenshot of one of her classes.
How long have you been teaching?
I've been a teacher for over 10 years. I started as a kindergarten teacher and then mainly focused on teaching high school for LA Unified School District and San Francisco USD. I taught primarily biology, chemistry and then some math if they needed me. I'm a fluent Spanish speaker, so when they needed me I would teach Spanish well.
So what inspired you to go back to teaching young people?
I just love teaching and I've taught so many different ages. I thought I'm just gonna offer this to the world, so I tweeted about it and I got a bunch of emails. I tweeted it the Friday that we were told at our nonprofit that we wouldn't be coming back the next Monday. That Monday is when I started the Zoom classes.
It’s been really cool because at first it was just kind of an organic thing, a parent would tell another parent who would tell another parent. This week was the first week where I've been trying to use the website that I built over the weekend.
How do you decide what you’re going to teach?
At first, I was just choosing things that I really liked. I don't know if you've seen it, but a bunch of aquariums are kind of just letting their penguins wander because there's no one around. So I was like, I'm gonna do a lesson on penguins. That was my first one. I showed them those cute videos and told them how fast the penguins swim and why a penguin moves a certain way.
So they eventually started making requests and every once in awhile I’ll still come up with a topic. Like yesterday, we talked about atoms. And that was just because I thought it was a neat way to bring everything together. We've been learning about different animals and different planets and things like that, so I wanted to teach them that everything is made of atoms.
At first, I thought it might be a problem that there were different ages in the class, but it's been really nice because an older child that's maybe in fourth grade or third grade is able to help a kindergartner or a pre-kindergartner understand what's going on or answer their questions.
What’s been the age range?
I would love to offer up a class for high schoolers, because that's where I spent most of my time teaching, but I've seen up to I think fourth grade. I'm actually running two classes a day, one is for like really little kids, like two or three or four years old. And then the other one is kind of all ages, or whoever shows up kind of thing.
How many kids are in each class?
Sometimes it's like 10 families tuning in. Sometimes it's almost 50, it really just depends. We actually had a really cool lesson, I just reached out randomly on Twitter to a paleontologist that I really admire. He responded and said yeah, I'll do it. So that was a really cool lesson, we had a whole lesson on dinosaurs. And then I have a friend who's a pediatrician and she briefly popped into a class and told us about what she does because we were talking about the human body. And so that's something I'd love to do more of too, bringing different people to at least just tell us what they do for like 10 minutes or something.
So what have you learned from this whole experience?
It has taught me a couple of things. There are there still quite a few families who don't have access to computers or the internet. Some of the families that I've been talking to want to tune in, but they don't have access to a device or to the internet. So they call a phone line, because Zoom allows you to do that. That's been really eye-opening. I feel like I should have known that that might be an issue because even with the nonprofit, the Friday before we went into shelter-in-place, we handed out a bunch of Chromebooks and hotspots. I just didn't make that jump though in my head.
I think another thing is just that kids learn really fast. I have some kids whose parents are working while I'm teaching them. So the kid is in front of the computer screen and they know to like mute themselves or unmute themselves if they want to answer a question. And that's really neat, to see that someone that's like four-years-old can pick that up really fast.
If you want to check out Melody’s classes, you can visit her site HERE.