2020: The year of COVID-19

COVID-19 is still rocking Australia. Victoria is still in lockdown; some states are opening up to South Australia and we still can’t go international. We are still sanitising our hands and, in some places, wearing masks.

But we are getting better in adapting to it – slowly.

COVID-19 shut down didn’t affect me too much. Yeah, it was a pain to not be able to go down to the pub for a meal and a drink. It was annoying as hell to not be able to buy toilet paper or have restrictions on basic things (#panicbuying) but overall, I wasn’t too affected by it.

I worked my butt off to get the lesson and unit plans structured for a move to online learning. I planned like I never had planned before and at the end of the day, I was thankful for it. I like to think that my students were thankful for it too as it gave them a sense of structure.

That was one thing I tried to give to all of my students: structure. Structure in the lesson flow, in my expectations, in how I approached them. I also let them see me as human. Many of my students were being negatively affected by COVID-19 in many, many ways and I wanted them to see that I was human and affected by it as much as them – even if it was a simple “Was planning on going out for dinner but we can’t any more”. They knew I was their teacher but they could also see me as human.

One of the hardest things we faced was the feeling of the unknown. Of not knowing if some students could come to school, if people we knew were going to have jobs or not, of if (or when) we would make the move to online, distance learning. Students were restless, their attention was rock bottom and work submission was for the most part even more sporadic than usual.

But we survived. Writing this at the end of Term 3, we still have one term to go, but the hard part is over. We have learnt how flexible we can be, how quickly we can pivot from our original plan to aa completely new one. We learnt the in’s and out’s of Zoom and Microsoft Teams and how to (hopefully) avoid the pitfalls.

Families, friends, strangers and more discovered how valued teachers are and how much work we actually do. They learnt that teaching isn’t just a ‘soft’ career, that a shit load of planning, hard work and heart goes into what we do.
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And that is the one thing I am probably most grateful for.