TORRINGTON – Gwen Walsh will simultaneously manage two classrooms this year for the first time in her 30 year career.
There’s the familiar one inside Trail Elementary School, where she’ll work in-person with 15 fifth graders donning colorful, personalized masks. Within that classroom is a new one that takes the form of a two-dimensional computer screen on the desk in front of her: six students tuning in from their living rooms and kitchen tables via Zoom, a video conferencing platform.
She strides around the classroom wearing a yellow dress and cheery disposition, helping both in-person and remote students with unprecedented technical difficulties, exuding the confidence you’d expect of a 30
year veteran.
When her students leave the classroom for music and physical education, Walsh removes her COVID-19-mandated mask and exhales a sigh of relief.
The first day of school is always nerve-wracking, when she meets a new group of kids and starts another nine-month journey. Walsh said this year’s nerves are like those she felt in her first year of teaching.
“I’ve known how to teach for 30 years and I don’t know how to teach right now,” Walsh said.
Behind her kind eyes with a crinkle suggesting a smile beneath her mask, Walsh is nervous. She’s excited to be reunited with students after almost five months out of the classroom, but nervous she or her students might contract COVID-19. Nervous technology like Zoom and Canvas is fallible. Nervous this school year will end like the spring semester, when faculty and staff scrambled to continue education virtually for students at the end of March, she said with tears in her eyes and a catch in her voice.
“We worked hard last year, and it was a disaster,” Walsh said. “We were working twice as hard and we produced stuff that wasn’t good. So we kind of failed. And people remind us that we failed. We don’t want to do that again.”
Despite the nerves, Walsh handles setbacks with grace and a contagious sense of humor. This year, Trail Elementary School implemented one-to-one computing, meaning each student has their own laptop for the first time. So, on top of lessons typical to fifth grade, such as continents and oceans, Walsh and her students are learning Zoom, Canvas and Office 365, programs many adults struggle with.
These students are of the generation dubbed “digital natives,” so they are adaptive and excited to show their technical skills.
“My parents use Office 365,” one said proudly.
“I do Zoom every Tuesday and Sunday, so I know how it works,” another boasts.
Learning new technology takes time. As she moves from raised hand to raised hand, answering questions about logging into their new devices, she senses she might be losing the 10 and 11 year olds’ attention. So she poses a question.
“So while we’re waiting, did anyone read any good books this summer?” Walsh said.
Eager hands shoot up to name their favorite summer reads, and Walsh takes the opportunity to read an excerpt from her favorite: The Girl who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill.
The first day of school was characterized by lessons not only in reading, writing, math and technology, but also in coronavirus etiquette. Walsh maintains a delicate balance between keeping morale high and relaying how important it is for students to take measures seriously.
For Walsh, the coronavirus is not political. She wants to protect herself and her students, but she acknowledges it is a political issue for some, and surprisingly enough, that message can make its way to fifth graders.
“Those are difficult topics because for some reason it has become political,” she said. “So you don’t want to get into that in a classroom, you want to honor everybody’s opinions and rights, but I was nervous that was going to come up.”
A giant red, white and blue stick demonstrates six feet of social distancing for students. Each time they exit and reenter the classroom, they line up to wash their hands.
Aside from sneaking a sip of water once in a while, students wear their masks with little complaint.
One student wore a mask with baseballs on it, inciting conversation about his favorite baseball team. Like a backpack or a t-shirt, masks show students’ personalities, Walsh said.
“We’ll probably see even more individualism as we go along,” she said.
Provisions in place to protect from COVID-19 are welcomed by Walsh’s fifth graders, as are their Zoom classmates.
Students in the physical classroom try to wave at their friends over Zoom, though the webcam is pointed in Walsh’s direction. As soon as she notices, she makes a point to turn the camera toward the class eager to greet their friends.
Soon there will be 360 degree cameras in the classroom to merge the experience of remote and in-person learners a bit more, Walsh said. For now, she’s playing to both a physical and virtual room of kids from her laptop’s built-in webcam.
“It’s tough because they are two different things, and we want them to have the same experience,” Walsh said. “But I told them this morning, I’m going to forget things, I’m going to forget that they don’t have the same text in front of them.”
But Walsh made it clear on day one that remote learning won’t be a cake walk. From couches and dining room chairs, students are expected to participate in class and answer questions as if they’re physically present.
She strives not only to make remote students’ education equal to that of classroom learners, she also wants them to have a positive social experience.
“I had three students yesterday when they came to pick up their computers, their parents brought them in so they could meet me,” Walsh said. “And they can see our classroom, so that they would kind of know before they got started. They were just as nervous as anybody the day before school, maybe a little more.”
When Walsh’s in-person students went outside for a mask-break, her remote students came with her. While one student is in charge of sanitizing the door handles each time the class exits and enters the building, another is happily in charge of holding the laptop containing their remote classmates.
Half of Walsh’s hour-long midmorning break is spent helping a remote student learn Zoom and Canvas. It’s the first time they’re meeting, as there was confusion about whether class started Tuesday or Wednesday. When his face materializes onto the screen, the two greet each other with excited waves and smiles and introduce themselves.
“Hi, I’m Mrs. Walsh!” she says.
She shows him his PE folder, which isn’t part of her class, but she listens patiently as he reads aloud his homework assignments and answers his questions about what it means to keep an exercise log.
When the class, in-person and remote, returns from PE, they see their new addition on the big screen that projects remote learners’ images to the class.
They scream greetings and wave in his direction excitedly. Walsh smiles, too.
“This year is hard,” she said. “I just don’t want to disappoint them.”
