Nine children, nine Chromebooks, nine different Google Classroom accounts and nine different daily schedules to remember and enforce. I went from only changing diapers and calming crying toddlers to having to teach a 1st grader how to use Google Slides. Now there were still tears, tears from my lead teacher to my students. In the makeshift classroom of the Child Development Center, we all shared breakdowns together during this 2020-2021 school year.
On campus there is a childcare center on campus that caters to the Kent State community. That place is called the Child Development Center (CDC). For this past year, the CDC has been the place that has felt like home.
I started working at the CDC in January of 2020. I worked in the toddler room where I rocked and sang to 14 1 ½ - 3-year-olds. Well, then March of that dreaded year came along, and I think we can all figure out what happened next. We shut down. Going into the fall 2020 semester I didn’t know if I would have a job there or not and parents didn’t know if they would have childcare or not.
The threat of the CDC not reopening led to an open letter being sent to the Kent State University Provost's office saying:
“We write to urge the University to ensure the continued operation of the Kent State University Child Development Center (CDC), by guaranteeing it financial support if tuition revenue is insufficient and by allowing it to remain open when the campus moves to fully remote instruction. The CDC provides amazing early education to over 150 children from 18 months to 6 years...”
The letter concluded with 431 signatures from current and former CDC parents, teachers and KSU alumni. With this letter and the help of the university, the CDC sent out their reopening plan in August.
When I first got my schedule I was only scheduled as a runner. A new position that was a result of COVID-19 restrictions. Parents were no longer allowed in the building and health screenings must be performed before the children can enter the building. As a runner, I would help the child with their things, take their temperature as well as find out what their pick-up plan was for the day. Then the child and I would walk down to the classroom one at a time as the classes could not intermingle.
Along with the new runner position, a new classroom was also opened. A classroom of school-agers. Nine 1st-3rd graders with younger siblings attending the CDC, who are now taking on fully online school or hybrid school methods.
In the surrounding area, parents were able to choose whether their child was to go to school in a hybrid half online, half in-person method or a fully online method. This made it so if both parents had to work, the child would have to go somewhere else to do their online work.
Within the first week of this new classroom and online dynamic, it became too much for just one teacher. This is when I was asked to be the TA three days a week for the school-agers.
Imagine you are seven years old. You might have watched a video or played a game on your parents’ laptop or maybe you are lucky enough to have a kid’s tablet. But a computer has never been known to you as a work machine. You have never had to sit for hours in front of a screen. You don’t understand what it means when it says, “bad connection.” You check to see that your Chromebook is plugged in so that means connected, right? You don’t understand that you don’t have to open a new tab every time you want to do something else. You are just learning to write but now you have to type too, and you type with one finger. I spent too much time watching these 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders slam their hands down on their Chromebooks in frustration, pull at their hair and cry out because they just don’t understand.
I sat down with one of my third graders who is fully online to talk about what he thinks of online school.
“The bad part is internet connection because then you miss important information and then you have to ask again and then the teachers like, ‘why are you not listening?’ Then you have to say ‘I got kicked out.’ It's just annoying, I mean not that I like schoolwork because nobody really likes schoolwork but it's hard to do schoolwork if it when it kicks you out every time you try. It’s just ahh, I don't know.”
Grappling with new technology as well as new material in a new world is something that these children and teachers simply were not prepared for. In a report by Emma García and Elaine Weiss from Economic Policy Institute, “Research on homeschooling shows that it works well for students for whom intentional, personalized, and sufficient resources are available. The crisis-induced delivery of homeschooling without time for planning around children’s learning styles and circumstances means that many children homeschooled during the pandemic are not replicating such model and thus not reaping the associated benefits.”
There are students in my class who simply are not cut out for online learning. They struggle to stay still in front of their camera and in view of their teacher. All of the teachers my students have require that the students have their cameras on and that they are seated and in view. We try to enforce headphones in the classroom as we may have up to five children on a meeting at the same time. Many days resulted in me getting overwhelmed by sensory overload. We try and listen in to some of the students' meetings to make sure they are working on what they need to be.
Luckily for some of the students that were only hybrid, they were sent to the CDC with packets of worksheets to do or online assignments to do. We did not have to worry about getting them signed in and in a meeting at a certain time. But this leniency on the hybrid children only frustrated the children with meetings even more. We were constantly bombarded with “but why does he get to play?” and “I have so much work and they are already done. This isn’t fair!” I could not even disagree with them because it is not fair. This whole year hasn’t been fair. Their teachers and school districts aren’t being fair. It got to a point where all I could tell them is “no, it's not fair, and I’m sorry, but we have to get this work done.” Then I would sit with them and help as much as I can as a journalism major who has never taken an elementary education class in her life.
As the year went on things did get easier. By the beginning of 2021, the schools were starting to open up more. Teachers were getting vaccinated. And by the students’ last nine weeks of school, the school districts decided to reintroduce the hybrid children to full-time, minus Monday, which remains online. My classroom went from multiple meetings and juggling nine Chromebooks to three fully online students sitting on their meetings that they have fallen accustomed to. On Mondays, I still get to see and interact with the nine children that I’ve watched grow and overcome so much since the beginning of the school year. But now they come into the CDC excited to tell me what happened at school and reconnect with our little CDC family that they haven't seen since the previous Monday.
I went into this job thinking it would only be a part-time job and just a means to pay my rent. It ended up being so much more than that. As my days come to an end at the CDC, I look back at the things I have learned and the relationships I gained. My kids taught me how to play again and the importance of breaks, we all need them. My students, bosses and coworkers all made the CDC a home for me. When there were days I didn’t want to get up at 7:00 a.m. because of a bad mental health day, they would welcome me through those doors with a cheerful and zealous “Miss Jess!” And for the times I felt like I wasn’t doing enough to help these children, one of my students would random;y come up to me and hand me a piece of artwork they created just for me, or come up to me and say “Miss Jess, you're the best teacher.”
As much as I was there for them, they were there for me. Even though my school-agers will return to school in the fall as vaccines become more available and restrictions are lessened, we will always have the memories made at the CDC during this treacherous year. I know my students and everyone at the CDC made this year easier for me; all I hope is that maybe, just maybe, I did the same for them.
That same third-grader frustrated with the internet and online learning tells me “I’m glad I get to come to the CDC. I love the CDC. That's the only good part about online learning.”
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