Want a Real Challenge in These Trying Times? Try Teaching Tykes Remotely!

The building looked familiar. The two-story brick and concrete structure, posted on my home town’s “I Love Ipswich” Facebook page, brought back memories. The questions posed – Which school is this? Who was your first teacher? What is the building now used for? – prompted a rapid-fire succession of answers.

“Shatswell School ...Miss Schofield...retirement living.”

I never knew Miss Schofield’s first name. Back in the mid-1950’s I’m not even sure if elementary school teachers were allowed to have first names. Hence I recall a Miss Schofield; a Mrs. Bamford; a Miss Joyce and a Mrs. Doucet populating the eight-classroom school. 

I also recall that Miss Schofield, my first grade teacher, did not practice social distancing. On the contrary, if you weren’t paying attention, she would swoop down to deliver a firm pinch to your cheek. If that didn’t work, there was a ruler handy.

I don’t recall getting the ruler treatment – it seemed more a looming threat than a deployed remedy – but I received the pinching treatment often enough that I thought I might end up with permanent dimples.

Different Times

Those of course were different times. Miss Schofield had been teaching for decades and her methods were then considered a tried and true norm. Today, young students have to find other ways to acquire dimples. 

Over the past five years or so I have been teaching, but in a far less challenging setting. I instruct 20-somethings at a college. It’s a graduate program, so the students tend to be more career-oriented and focused. They’re also typically paying for school themselves, which seems to concentrate the mind.

My teaching method employs a lot of walking around the classroom, occasionally whirling to pose a question or elicit a comment. It keeps me – and the students – on our toes.

But now we have COVID-19 and distance instruction.

Having taken the winter semester off, I am now busily preparing to teach again, starting in May, from afar.

Don’t Touch Your Face!

Students will be able to see me – and I will be able to see them. I expect this to be quite amusing. I sit on the board of a school, Hebron Academy, and was invited by the Head to watch the inaugural Zoom session for students. There were about 200 on the call and about 20 of them must not have gotten the memo that they’d be “on”. Let’s just say Miss Schofield would have reached through the monitor and whacked several with a ruler.

I stumbled into teaching – endowed with a totally unearned “professor” title – purely by accident. For years I’d been guest lecturing at various universities. Guest lecturing is dead easy. You go in; somebody introduces you, conflating your resume; you blather on for 30 minutes; answer a few questions; and run away.

So when Seneca College asked me if I’d like to teach, I said sure, why not?

Turns out the “why not” is that teaching, unlike guest lecturing, is hard work. Who knew?

 I have two sisters, Martha and Peggy, who did know. I just never bothered to ask.

Engaging Wee Tykes

Martha taught primary school at a number of places over many years, lastly in the challenging Boston system. More recently she attended Gordon-Conwell, to earn a Divinity degree. She is now a children’s pastor in Lynn, MA. She would tell you she hates being separated from her diminutive flock – except pastors don’t say ‘hate”. Let’s just call it “active dislike”.

“I love interacting with children and creating a safe environment where they can learn and grow", she says. “I do not like being separated from them! It is particularly difficult with my children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as I had developed coping techniques that only really work in the classroom.”

Martha’s verdict? “I am grateful for the technology we have, but pray for the day that social distancing will be a thing of the past.”

My sister Peggy – Ms. Russell to her charges – has been a primary school teacher in Boxford, MA, for 28 years. When I asked her to put down her thoughts regarding trying to instruct six and seven-year-olds at a distance, she sent me a passionate 2,000 word essay. For these purposes, it boils down to “I love my work...and physically separation means not being able to adjust to their individual developmental stages and needs”.

Cue the Worms

Keeping very young students engaged from a distance can be a real challenge. Peggy has occasionally employed her daughter’s pet rabbit, “Milo”, to capture their attention. A kindergarten teacher in Ontario has resorted to going into her garden to live-stream the digging up and display of earthworms to gain her student’s attention. 

What I now realize is that while all teachers, including those at high schools and colleges, are finding distance learning a challenge, elementary teachers deserve a special nod of appreciation and thanks. Engaging a six- or seven-year-old is not easy under any circumstances – and doing it remotely is something of a miracle. With or without the ability to pinch a cheek. Or the help of a rabbit named Milo.

(Robert Waite teaches at Seneca College in Toronto. He is Managing Partner at Waite + Co., with offices in Boston, Ottawa and Toronto. A slightly different version of this article appeared in Ipswich Local News.)