Learning from home: Parents getting a taste of what it's like to be teachers

When it comes to spreading an infectious disease like COVID-19, there may be no better method than sending kids to a public classroom to pick up coronavirus and any other bug on desktops and pencil sharpeners. Consequently, area schools have closed their doors and recently extended their closures through the month of April with the potential for a longer closure. As a result, many Laclede County parents have become at-home teachers, experiencing many of the same joys and challenges as regular classroom teachers and employing many of the same tactics. Tiffany Lowrance has two school-aged children she teaches at home. It has been a good experience for her family. “So far, it’s been really good. We haven’t really had a lot of issues,” Lowrance said. A common teaching technique is teach the teacher. “It’s kind of like the kids are teaching us what they’re learning. It’s kind of nice because I’m like ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ so then they kind of feel better because then they’re teaching us what’s going on,” Lowrance said. Lowrance has a sixth-grader at Lebanon Middle School and second-grader at Maplecrest. Instruction is delivered via online programs and emails. Her sixth-grader said science was the hardest subject for Mom to teach because at school there are more hands on learning opportunities. Teaching math was the tougher chore for Lowrance. “They try to teach me. I’m getting better. It’s definitely not like it was 12 years ago,” Lowrance said. With the extension of the closures for area schools to at least April 30, Lowrance and other parents have plenty of home schooling in their future. This gives Lowrance some concerns. “My thing is I’m afraid they’re not going to learn and grasp everything like they would at school and not be as ready for the next grade,” Lowrance said. She said this concern is a motivator for her teach her children well. She had plans for a science lab Wednesday, an outdoor lab on a sunny day. “They’re going to try to make a volcano today,” Lowrance said. In order to keep them active and off their phones to replicate the school environment, she has them doing crafts, paintings and exercising besides the online work. Lowrance said she was aware other parents had negative experiences. However, her experience has been a positive one. “Honestly, they haven’t fought me … They’re really enjoying it because they’re getting to each their younger siblings, a four and one-year-old. They enjoy showing them how to do this stuff,” Lowrance said. One downside for her kids was missing their friends from school. When her kids get restless or aggravated about something, a recess solves the problem. “We’ll take a break and then get back to it,” Lowrance said. She has picked up these time-honored teaching techniques and agreed she was on a path to teaching like a professional. “I’m getting there, kind of. I’m trying,” she said. For Jeremy Garner, it is the technological approach to teaching that has been a speed bump to learning. He appreciated the online tutorials about how to use Google Classroom. However, he noted that each teacher’s page was different. “Each teacher seems to want to use a different program, and a lot of those programs are overloaded and not working for half the students,” Garner said. Without multiple displays to keep the source material, notes and worksheets up, finding the answers was a chore. “By the time you get back to what you just read, you don’t remember what to write on your paper. There’s no going back to page 32 and reading it again. You’ve got to toss back between three screens and find it and by then you’ve forgot what you’re looking for,” Garner said. However, he lauded the teachers for their efforts. “The teachers have been amazing as far as we can email them all day long. The kids can contact straight from their Classroom page. They’ve been on point, but still it’s hard for them to help us remotely navigate what we’re trying to find,” Garner said. He said math was the hardest subject to teach. “The rest of the stuff you can find the answers. You can read a book. You can Google stuff to read and find the answer, but math’s tough,” Garner said. He has two seniors, a seventh grader, a fifth grader and an almost kindergartner. “I told my wife, Sabrina, that after this week, I’m just going to graduate all of them, and Monday they’re going to look for jobs,” Garner said. With five kids, he experiences the same wide range of grade levels that an early 1900s, one-room school teacher experienced. He said his students were well behaved. The challenge was in the number of kids. “It’s just overwhelming to have five in a classroom at the same time and have them all work. We’ve got a little workstation set up for each of them,” Garner said. He is ready to make sacrifices to end the pandemic even if it means another month of home schooling. “I thinks it’s important. I think we need to probably follow the recommendations and stay at home and quit going out and running around so we can get past this. And he joked he will make a very personal sacrifice. “My sanity has to be put on hold,” Garner said. Like Lowrance, Garner has his concerns about home schooling kids during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I just think that there’s a lot of kids that were on the line, struggling before this happened,” he said. He worries that not all parents with kids on the bubble will sit down with their kids and help them succeed. “They just going to fail from here,” Garner said. Tanya Turner has a unique perspective since she teaches English classes at Waynesville and has a son Carson, 9, in the fourth grade at Boswell. Consequently, she uses technology to teach her students in the morning before working with Carson in the afternoon. She has taught her Waynesville students online for three weeks and has learned to use a variety of online programs in her teaching. “I think it’s actually made me a better teacher. I am learning all these new technologies that I wouldn’t have been pushed to use before,” Turner said. As a Lebanon mom, she gets to supervise Carson as he uses a variety of online programs. He uses i-Ready for his math and language arts lessons, Stemscopes for science, Ducksters for social studies lessons and Epic for reading. “Carson was very familiar with all of these programs already, so it was very easy to transition,” Turner said. She is pleased with his progress. “He’s been doing about the same level of what he would be doing at school percentage-wise,” she said. During her lessons, she also has her son Jackson, 4, to keep an eye on. “I would say, teacher-mom and mom-mom, it’s been interesting mostly because of Jackson being four and very needy,” Turner said. Renee Durbin works her home schooling schedule around her work schedule at Lowe’s, which is made easier by her son Mason. “I’m lucky because my kid is really responsible. For example, yesterday when I was getting ready for work, he was already up and had his Chromebook out and was logging in and checking emails from his teachers,” Durbin said. She is thankful for her son’s teachers and wanted to thank them for their efforts. “I can’t speak about all the teachers at Lebanon High School, but I can tell you the ones my kid has are phenomenal. They are very good at communicating with him, and they’re making it very easy,” Durbin said. She said they had also contacted her to make sure Mason had access to technology. Like Lowrance and Garner, Durbin is not a fan of teaching Algebra. Consequently, she appreciates the Zoom meetings, which are like a video conference call. She said Mason and five other students conferenced at the same time with teachers who answered their questions. “That has made my job as a home schooler a lot easier,” Durbin said. A lot of parents are getting a taste of what teaching is like with their favorite students. Of course, they may be looking forward to summer as much as some classroom teachers do. Still, they are learning at the same time as their children, especially what it takes to save lives by stopping the coronavirus pandemic. “This is new for all of us. It’s a learning experience for everybody,” Garner said.