Education Week - April 29, 2020 - 10

Remote Teaching: 'I Started to Have a Panic Attack'
Educators' stress
is skyrocketing
during pandemic
Stress isn't new to teachers, but
what they're experiencing now
makes their typical stress seem like
a picnic. Driven by a pandemic to the
front lines of an unprecedented rush
to distance-learning, the nation's
teachers are scrambling to manage
an armful of new challenges. And
they're exhausted.
That exhaustion emerges from a
tangle of dynamics. Teachers are
grappling with unfamiliar technologies. They have to retrofit-or reinvent-their lessons and find new ways
to do familiar things, like grading
homework. They're inundated with
emails, texts, and calls from principals, parents, and students. They're
trying to "be there" for students and
their families. And many are also juggling the needs of their own children
or other loved ones while managing
their own coronavirus fears.
Amy Pollington, a kindergarten
teacher at Saint George School, a private K-8 in Seattle, didn't mince words
when she described her first week of
distance-teaching.
"By the fourth day, I started to have
a panic attack," she said. "I hadn't
slept. I was feeling like the walls were
coming in on me."
Sitting there in a living room chair,
her $6 Amazon classroom-backdrop
poster taped up behind her, Pollington
had to shut down her laptop and her
phone to regain her composure. She
was trying so hard to "give 150 percent, to be there every moment of the
day and night" for her families. But
she had to stop. Just for a few minutes.
She isn't alone. In interviews with
Education Week, teachers described
staying up until 2 or 3 a.m., to answer
emails, trouble-shoot technology or
plan lessons. They can't seem to shut
it off. Papers are strewn across their
living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms.
And on top of the stress and exhaustion, they're grieving.
"I'm sorry I'm crying, but just to
be with them, their little faces, every
day, in person, I miss that so much,"
said Angie Shaw, who teaches 1st
grade at Longfellow Elementary in
Scottsbluff, Neb.
She aches for the familiar routines
and rituals of her brick-and-mortar
school day and how she knew every
loose tooth, every hurt feeling, in her
students' lives. Shaw holds a weekly
evening circle time on Zoom, but she
can't get the kind of connection she's
used to with each student.

A New Level of Multitasking
One of Rana El Yousef's recent days
illustrates the complexities that teachers are now managing. El Yousef,
a high school chemistry teacher in
Glendora, Calif., multitasked during

Courtesy of Theresa Bruce

By Catherine Gewertz

Theresa Bruce, who teaches 8th grade social studies at KIPP-Harmony school in Baltimore, is haunted by what could
be happening with the students who aren't showing up for online sessions.

her morning dog-walk, using it as her
twin 9-year-old sons' "recess" and as
a quick tutorial in writing and fractions so they could get started on their
teacher's assignments.
Home again, she made the boys
breakfast and got them logged onto
their Chromebooks. Then El Yousef
tackled a brimming inbox, scanning
each email's demands: There's a science department Zoom meeting at
2 p.m., as well as her sons' 3rd grade
Zoom meeting. There's another
Zoom meeting at 3 p.m. for honors
and Advanced Placement teachers.
It was hours before she could get to
her own students, and the emails were
flooding in. El Yousef had posted YouTube videos with lessons and worksheets, and a do-at-home science
experiment and a Google quiz. Students were asking: How do I answer
this lab question? How do I submit my
answers? Between emails, she graded
her AP students' practice quizzes and
surveyed her students about their online access. And there's the small matter of planning new lessons, too.
"I've been staring at a computer
for eight solid hours, my eyes are
strained, my shoulders are tense,
and I have to keep reminding myself,
all this is new, and we are all learning, and it will get easier, I hope," El
Yousef said.
Teachers also feel caught between
their students and families, who are
overflowing with questions, and their
principals, who often can't provide
answers yet.
"Families are asking, what is grading going to look like? What are they
going to base promotion on? And we
don't know yet," said Theresa Bruce,
who teaches 8th grade social studies at the KIPP-Harmony School in
Baltimore. "We're used to being able

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 29, 2020 | www.edweek.org

to quickly get answers for our parents. But not being able to answer, it
plagues your mind."

Haunted by the No-Shows
Bruce and her students are more
comfortable than many with technology-based instruction, since their
school is a blended-learning environment, with 1-to-1 computing. Even
still, teaching from home is a massive
and difficult change, she said. Among
other things, she's lost the cues that
she can pick up only from seeing her
students in person, she said.
"When I'm with them, I can see
what's really going on with them," she
said. "But digitally, they can hide it:
their joy. Their depression. Anybody
can put their game face on for an hour
on Zoom."
Bruce is haunted by the ones who
aren't signing on for virtual sessions. In
the past, she wouldn't hesitate to call
home if a child missed class. But now,
with parents losing jobs, or maybe
caring for ill relatives, Bruce isn't sure
if a call is too intrusive. She agonizes:
"Should I reach out? Is that too much?"
Teachers report that simple things
take much longer as they get used
to working with online tools. Ayako
Anderson, who teaches Japanese to
high school students at three schools
in the Boston suburbs, said that just
noting an incorrect verb conjugation
on a student's paper recently required
a laborious process of zooming in and
out on her iPad, switching cursors and
forming one word with a scratchy red
scrawl.
In a brick-and-mortar world, she'd
be able to make more extensive comments quickly, with a pen on paper.
But she recognizes that adapting
paper practices to computer can it-

self be inefficient. One of the schools
where she teaches is 100 percent virtual, and its systems and processes are
designed for online learning, so they
work better, she said.
Teaching from home comes with
another risk: too little physical activity. Teachers said they're worn out
from sitting still in front of a computer
so much. "My body aches from sitting
for hours on end," said Shaw. Anderson said that since she doesn't need to
"walk from classroom to classroom
anymore, or walk to lunch," she finds
herself sitting endlessly, working until
the hours blur and it's 3 a.m.

Trying to Go From Zero to 60
Experts in online learning, and in
grief and stress, say none of what
teachers are experiencing is surprising. Susan Patrick, the CEO of the
Aurora Institute, a nonprofit that supports districts with virtual learning,
said it's impossible to do full-scale
distance-learning instantly.
"There's a reason districts and
schools take one to two years planning
time," she said. "You can't go from
zero to 60 in 24 hours if you don't have
the processes and structures in place."
Michael Barbour, who focuses on
virtual learning as an associate professor of education at Touro University
California, said research shows that
preparing lessons for distance-learning can be more time-consuming than
for brick-and-mortar settings. Plans
for live-or synchronous-sessions
can take up to three times as long, he
said, and plans for asynchronous lessons can take as much as five to eight
times longer.
Experts said teachers and those
around them shouldn't discount the
emotional toll that the sudden shift to

home teaching is taking on them.
"Being asked to suddenly do something you're not skilled in, coping
with the worry about coronavirus in
their own lives, feeling they're not
doing enough for kids and parents,
plus their fears about next fall, and
how their students and families
could really be suffering mentally
and financially then, all of that
piles up into an amazing amount of
stress," said Kathleen Minke, the executive director of the National Association of School Psychologists.
Teachers' experience of grief is
going unacknowledged, too, as exhaustion and stress take a higher profile, experts said. That can produce a
phenomenon known as "disenfranchised grief "-a grief that's tougher
because it's not acknowledged and
accepted, said Kenneth Doka, a psychologist who specializes in grief.
"It could be hard for teachers to feel
they can complain about the loss of
not seeing their students, when they
know people out there are dying,"
Doka said. "But that lack of recognition leads to [a] more complicated
[form of] grief."
The combination of stress and grief
can produce brain changes that make
the already-stressful job of teaching
even tougher, said Patricia A. Jennings, a professor of education at the
University of Virginia and an expert
in teacher stress. The sudden shift to
the new demands of home teaching,
laced with fears about coronavirus,
blend into a kind of trauma that can
shift the brain from higher-order
thinking skills into survival mode.
"We might shut down a bit, space
out, dissociate, or check out because
we can't cope very well," Jennings
said. "We might also get into a kind
of hypervigilance, where we're constantly checking emails or news developments, and it's hard to concentrate."
Little by little, though, teachers are
finding ways to adapt. Anderson, in
Massachusetts, now sketches her daily
schedule out in Google Calendar, to
help her build clearer beginnings and
endings into her work hours. With
her district's blessing, Pollington, in
Seattle, now sends home lesson plans
every other day, instead of daily.
In her first home-teaching days, Pollington woke up anxious and disorganized. Should she check email first or
feed the dogs? She rushed to answer
every email right away. Now, each
morning she turns on her computer,
feeds the dogs and makes coffee. Then
she responds to students' work on the
video app Flipgrid. She gives herself 24
hours to respond to emails. She still forgets to eat lunch, but she's working on
that. She tries to stop working at 4 p.m.
And she tries not to feel guilty about it.
Bruce encourages teachers to "give
themselves the grace they need" to
set realistic goals and take care of
themselves. Try actually scheduling
time in each day for something that
brings you joy, she said.
"Like anything, the first year is
tough, but over time, you learn and
adapt," Bruce said. "You're gonna regroup. You're gonna recover."

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Education Week - April 29, 2020

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