Time Blurs For High Schoolers

Sani Esson lingered after the rest of Marina Kroopneck’s Zoom-held algebra class had disbanded. She admitted she had not looked at the class assignments. She joked that the assignments threw off her sleep schedule — referring to a serious challenge for high schoolers ​“attending” classes without showing up in person.

The New Haven Academy math class, and Sani’s adjustment struggles, offered a glimpse into what high school is like during the Covid-19 pandemic: reliant on student initiative and strong relationships with staff. Previous time-set structures have disappeared.

“Students are not used to being 100 percent responsible for doing their assignments. They are really having a hard time managing their time and are now feeling so defeated. They feel like they’ve fallen so far behind,” Kroopneck said.

Class On Zoom

Kroopneck used her weekly algebra Zoom call on Tuesday to check in on her students. A handful joined the video call; she checks in with the others individually.

She reminded the students about two practice assignments and a quiz they were supposed to turn in that week. Students often forget the crucial step of marking the assignments complete on Google Classroom, which alerts her that their work is done, she said.

Kroopneck then called on students to identify the kinds of slopes of various lines. A student named Paris guessed that a line had a positive slope, ​“because it’s going up from left to right,” she said. Other students found their way to identifying positive and negative slopes and horizontal lines with a slope of zero.

The problems were on a website Kroopneck found called Math is Fun. Kroopneck already used technology frequently in class before schools closed in March. This made the transition to distance learning easier both for her and her students.

“The things they’re used to, they are doing well. Students are super overwhelmed with all these new things in all their classes,” Kroopneck said.

Kroopneck often pulls up the new technology in her Zoom sessions so students can get used to how to use websites and find help.

She has students complete quizzes on Quizizz and fill out their answers to worksheets on Google Forms — always reserving the right to ask for a picture of the work they did to get to the answer. This both prevents cheating and helps her understand the steps they took, she said.

She also asks students to provide their own videos that explain a concept they are learning in class. She teaches them which search terms will yield helpful results and which will show irrelevant videos.

“Me choosing a video that makes sense to me is one thing. When students take it upon themselves to find a video and post it into a document where everybody can look at it, they are much more invested in that,” Kroopneck said.

Her biggest recommendation to other math teachers was to stick to their normal revision process, where students rewrite their work to get to the right answers.

“Revision, revision, revision. How can we have students work on skills if they are not learning from their mistakes?” she said.

Seven Mondays A Week

Marco Cenabre, a literature teacher at New Haven Academy, has settled on a similar combination of digital assignments and virtual discussions.

Both teachers said that around 75 percent of their students are consistently submitting assignments and engaging in discussions. Cenabre asks students to journal regularly, as an easy assignment for them and a basic check on whether they are looking at the assignments at all.

Students tell him that every day feels the same, and the homework never seems done. The boredom and monotony are the biggest challenges, they say.

In addition, student routines and sleep patterns are all off. Cenabre observed that 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. are not early class times. But students show up to class rubbing their eyes, clearly having woken up just to attend.

“I have a student in my advisory group who sleeps at 5 a.m, wakes up at 4 p.m. and gets everything done,” he said.

The more consistently he provides feedback, the more his students engage, he found.

“Even if it’s just saying that I see you did it. You’re not putting this work into a black hole,” Cenabre said.

Cenabre said that students are also more likely to engage in class if each week is a separate chunk of work. This allows students to miss a week of assignments but get back into the swing of schoolwork the next week without feeling behind.

“I couldn’t give out a novel,” he explained.

Instead, Cenabre asked his Race, Power and Americana class to watch poetry in the form of rap and spoken word videos. Students posted their reactions to an online forum and commented on two other students’ answers.

The most popular video among the students was the song ​“Black Snakes” by Prolific The Rapper and A Tribe Called Red. Students wrote about who gets to tell the story of a people or a moment in time and why.

The other half of the assignment was to write their own poems about identity. Each line had to include the words ​“I am” or ​“I’m from.”

One student, Rhea Bacourt, began her poem with the line, ​“I am from the ​‘broken’ down part of the Caribbean but honestly a bit of everywhere.”

Later in the poem, after describing beauty, language and tragedy in Haiti, she talks about her family: ​“I am from my mother. The most Haitian woman I’ve ever met. … I am most definitely my father’s daughter, or so I’ve heard. I am from a ​‘broken’ home.”

During the weekly Zoom class, Cenabre asked the students to work in groups to combine their poems into one.

“I’m happy to say that students said it felt like normal. It felt like class,” Cenabre said.

Cenabre lives with his sister and five nieces. When she goes to work, he is in charge of both running his classes and homeschooling his nieces. He makes it work by making sure the family sticks to a routine. They eat lunch at 11:30 and all take structured breaks during the day, he said.

Cenabre said that he is working fewer hours officially and spending more time thinking about logistics, like how to preserve the valuable parts of a group discussion in an online format.

“It feels more exhausting. I agree with the kids — you live seven Mondays a week,” he said.

Irreplaceable

New Haven Academy did not experience the same challenges with technology as other schools. The school already had one Chromebook available per student, according to NHA co-founder Meredith Gavrin.

The challenge was having enough time to hand the laptops out. Schools found out about the closures on the last day schools were open. There was barely enough time to tell kids to take home their textbooks, much less organize laptop distribution, Gavrin said.

The school started dropping off laptops with families soon after and then handed distribution over to the school system.

New Haven Academy is still following up with the last few students who are not accessing classes. According to Gavrin, 94 percent of students logged into NHA’s system to check assignments or messages last week.

Teachers have various levels of familiarity with online learning tools. Gavrin and Principal Gregory Baldwin now face a dilemma in how much to invest in training.

“I feel like we’re all learning to get better at something we don’t want to be doing in the first place,” she said.

“I’m not buying into the national conversation that says this is the revolution of online learning. I think this is a huge case for why we do business the way we do it most of the time.”

Gavrin explained that learning requires taking risks, and that requires trust. Teachers build trust with students better in person. They read students’ body language and glance at incomplete work to understand when they are struggling. The right adult can easily pull a student aside to help them work through a challenge at home.

The civic engagement and social justice themes of the magnet school can be hard to get to without a physical classroom, Gavrin said. For example, one 10th grade class is currently learning about apartheid.

“We have to be very careful to build a climate where it feels safe to talk about and see certain videos. We have not felt safe just throwing that stuff online,” she said.

With all of these challenges, the school will have ​“a major moment of reckoning” over the summer about how to play catch-up, Gavrin said.

One Day At A Time

Sani had done the first and most important step of distance learning; she had signed up for Google Classroom. Kroopneck is her advisor and had helped her get that far during a recent call.

Kroopneck pointed Sani to the most important assignment to start with. She asked her for a commitment for when she would finish that first assignment.

“Today?” Sani offered.

Kroopneck said that she could do the next assignment the following day and Sani groaned.

“If you do one assignment per day, you’ll be able to catch up by Sunday,” Kroopneck said.

“That’s not too bad,” Sani said.