As with almost anything in life, until we have lived an experience, we are not capable of truly understanding it (it is why I have written so often in this project about the need to learn by doing). But while I have written frequently about the digital divide during this pandemic and its impact on education, I have done so primarily from an theoretical perspective: I have access to the available data, know how to analyze and interpret it, and have the intellectual training to extrapolate the consequences of it for teaching and learning.
Admittedly, I have had numerous glimpses throughout this school year of how inadequate access to the on-line realm can affect the quality of someone’s learning as I have watched the same children dropped from my class time and again or waited patiently for the screen to unfreeze so that a student and I could speak once more. But those of been moments of mere inconvenience, and I have not possessed the deeper knowledge that comes from lived experience.
All that changed this past week. The internet access has been a little wonky at my current school all year (hence the glimpses), but Friday morning, it went full-scale meltdown while I was attempting to teach some statistics to my seniors. It was a fully virtual day with that class in our hybrid schedule, and I had just finished presenting the three equations we would be practicing that period and was trying to set up the breakout rooms for my students to work in when, quite abruptly, my zoom link simply stopped working.
Initially unconcerned, I sought to reactivate it, only to have the infamous spinning symbol twirl away on my screen for nearly five minutes. Then, when the on-line connection finally did take hold once more, I was met by a chorus of voices frantically asking questions about what they did not understand—which lasted all of 30 seconds before my zoom linked dropped me yet again.
I will spare readers the full account, but needless to say, after getting dropped six times in 30 minutes, with each reconnect leading to ever more mounting frustration from my students—some of who were now trapped in breakout rooms I couldn’t access—my lesson for the day was effectively shredded. With 15 minutes to go, I finally accepted defeat and e-mailed them an alternative activity we would have eventually done that was decidedly low-tech and simply trusted them to use the time productively to start to construct their pedigree charts for the following week.
As I sat afterward in the silence of my classroom, I have seldom felt such anger and discouragement. I was already struggling, as I have all year, with the gut-punching knowledge that I have been forced to use a venue that prevents me from engaging in what I know is essential to good teaching. But in my heart and mind, I knew I was at least trying to educate as effectively as the innate limits of a virtual classroom allows, and here, even that had been taken from me.
To make matters worse, the pleas for attention from the students in the brief moments of contact left me realizing that children had needed me, and I had failed to be there for them. It did not matter that rationally I knew the fault was not mine; emotionally, I had failed them as their teacher, and so furious was the intensity of my feelings at that moment that I almost crushed the coffee travel mug in my hand. It felt like I had betrayed everything I have ever practiced or preached as an educator, and as I later shared with a colleague, I had to actively resist the urge to walk out the door, never to return.
Now I suspect that many who read all of this are going to raise an eyebrow or two thinking “Uh, weren’t you over-reacting just a little?” After all, it was only one lesson in an entire year of lessons, and heaven knows, it was certainly not the first—or even remotely the worst—botched teaching moment in a career of 30+ years. So wherefore the intensity of the response?
The answer, I think, lies in the psycho-emotional cost it takes to be in any human services field right now. Those of us on the front lines of actively caring for our society at this exact moment in time have to bring all the usual energy it takes to attend to the emotional, physical, and mental needs of others, and then on top of that, we have to bring the energy needed to believe and act as if what we are doing right now to serve others is actually having a positive impact in their lives in the face of a pandemic that every day seems to suggest otherwise. It is why I empathize so deeply with those in the medical field: they are having to bring this energy to believe they are making a difference each day only to watch it regularly fail to do so as yet another patient under their care dies of COVID. My Friday class was my metaphorical patient, and I just didn’t have any energy left to cope with its “death.”
But as I processed my reactions to my failed lesson, I realized that I had gained some valuable and potent insight and empathy into how the digital divide in education is impacting those currently enduring it. It takes an enormous amount of energy for all children everywhere right now to get up each day, log on to a screen, and act as if what they are doing matters. They have none of the usual energizing rewards that come from in-person interactions, and even whatever activities they are doing on a given day are, at best, the mere manipulation of a bunch of electrons. When I dive within to recall my own 6-to-18-year-old selves and how this situation would feel to them, “this sucks!” is the polite version of what emerges; so I know how difficult it must be right now for any student to show up for a zoomed class (heck, I know how hard it is for me, and I have to behave as if I’m happy and eager to be there!).
Hence, as I place myself in my students’ collective shoes, I then take how Friday’s class felt and now place myself in the shoes of the students for whom their internet connection is a feeble public wi-fi hotspot which they access out of the passenger seat of a car in the parking lot outside their closed school or county library. I recall how frustrated and anxious I was for only one lesson and think how it must feel to experience that for every single class, all day long, every single school day, never knowing what is being missed as the zoom link disconnects and reconnects over and over again.
Talk about enduring a Sisyphean task! The wonder isn’t that we have children whom teachers have not seen in their virtual classes for weeks on end; the wonder is that children who live under these conditions keep showing up at all. I already had tremendous respect for my student, “John,” who is dropped from my zoom at least once every virtual class period (with an average I have calculated at three per hour). But now that I have a deeper awareness of how that must feel for him, I want to build a pedestal and mount a statue of him for all to marvel at his fortitude!
I also want to not have to keep grading him. That has been the other insight which my more direct encounter with the digital divide has produced. My regular readers already know my thoughts about grading and how much I agree with Sheldon Eakins, that “if we’re grading right now, we’re grading privilege” (Newhouse). But I had to submit a semester grade for “John,” as well as all my other students this past week, and while I own that grading is a required part of my job description, I have seldom felt more discomfited by it than I have this current academic year. Friday’s class only reinforced those feelings as my own failure to transmit some essential skills for understanding biological inheritance caused me to see that failure from the other side. How can I hold any student accountable for mastering a body of knowledge when I recognize that, courtesy of faulty digital access, they may never have received the transmission of that knowledge in the first place?
Yet students at the University of Maryland, College Park, report this past fall being pressured to avoid the available pass-fail option for their on-line courses—in spite of an overall drop in the level of student performance—because of the potential profile it could present for future graduate school and career options. And it has been the surge in failing grades among K-12 students here in Maryland that has caused public protests by parents to demand the re-opening of schools for in-person learning. All without anyone seeming to question whether it might be inequities in the virtual learning platform and not the virtual learning itself that might be the source of the problem at all levels of education.
Granted, the virtual platform simply is an inferior educational tool, and as I wrote in my most recent post, the costs of having to employ it during this pandemic are going to be enormous. But for those on the wrong side of the digital divide, those costs are going to be even worse, and just how much worse is a new, deeper insight I now take as an educator moving forward. Somehow, I need to work to find better ways to bridge it; I owe it to all my “John’s.”
References
Newhouse, K. (May 11, 2020). Why Grading Policies for Equity Matter More Than Ever. Mindshift. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55889/why-grading-policies-for-equity-matter-more-than-ever?fbclid=IwAR2Wz2sXs_xdS0rLh9Oxhrgrfx0NP5oHjSfz6Z4SSK7dY2e3zz248-L9ilM.
University of Maryland (Nov. 20, 2020) Fall 2020 Student Experience Survey: Undergraduate Student Initial Results. https://svp.umd.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/Fall%202020%20Student%20Survey%20-%20undergraduates%20-%20initial%20results%20-%20Nov%202020.pdf.
Wood, P.; Stole, B; & Bowie, L. (Jan. 22, 2021) Maryland Gov. Hogan Calls on Schools to Bring Students Back to Classrooms by March Under Hybrid Learning Plan. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-hogan-salmon-covid-schools-update-20210121-5r74ewa7nnfg7bq4hjsdrwcfju-story.html
Light a Candle 