Learn from 2020

    No matter who you ask, 2020 was a year that brought challenges. No matter the occupation or home location, many of us endured the stress and the many challenges of 2020. Did somebody say global pandemic?

    As an educator, the Coronavirus impacted my life personally and professionally. At the tail end of my spring break this past March is when I received the news via email that my school would be closed due to the pandemic and we would begin teaching from home in less than a week. The email contained a lot of fluff, a lot of uncertainties and at the end of the email we were informed that when we return from break, we would have two days to come up with a plan for each of our classes and create expectations for what learning from home would look like. Teaching from home with little to no preparation? Fine! I learned at the start of my career that I had to be flexible as changes with education, students, standards, etc., would often happen and with little to no notice. The difficulty with the change of teaching online was that my students had no preparation with what learning from home should look like. As a special education teacher, my students (and I as well) thrived with routines and now I had to figure out routines virtually. Again, this was fine (or so I thought)! 

    It was a Thursday of our first week and I had connected with nearly every student on my caseload and internally thought, “Ok! This isn’t as bad as I anticipated.” The second week was similar to the first but then it went downhill. Fewer and fewer students started showing up online and no form of communication with the student or guardian worked. For one of the first times I felt like a huge failure professionally, especially knowing that my students would be headed off to high school even though they hadn’t participated nor learned at least 9 weeks of curriculum. Unfortunately, the challenges didn’t end here. 

    The purpose of my blog is to bring to light the challenges of being a gay educator along with a few other challenges that I work through; work through alone or with the help of others. The newest challenge during this time learning at home was having a student whose parent is homophobic but did well with taking offense to those allegations and throughout the entire school year they had pinned the dislike of me being gay on their child. Not to mention (according to this parent) that my student didn’t feel comfortable with me and that is why they were underperforming academically as well as behaviorally. This was incredibly difficult to work through as I had no coworkers to easily talk to since we were all at our homes trying to support numerous students during this time. Having to recall such an incident as I write this is infuriating but only because I feel that I should've stood up for myself better than what I did. I only fought for myself once and when the hate and issues continued with that parent, I gave up and allowed them to win by my stepping down as the child’s case manager and having another special educator take over for the remainder of the school year. I should’ve fought harder but lesson learned and when a similar situation happens in my future, I will not give up! Being gay doesn’t impact how I teach and if anything, being gay makes me a better educator as I have experience and knowledge in such areas that many of my hetero colleagues do not or can't relate to. Everyone has their niche and mine is using my experience as an out gay educator to support LGBTQ+ students, educate students through our current curriculums, and better educate staff. 

    Fast forward to summer...After some time I was able to talk myself out of the funk of feeling responsible for my students not participating during at-home learning and remind myself, “I did everything I could do to help and feeling sorry for myself won’t change students grades or understanding of the missed curriculum.” It was time to learn from the past and prepare for a new school year with even more changes. 

    Bring on a new school year with some knowledge of at-home learning and awareness of what worked and didn’t work for students in special ed. Didn’t know until the week prior to the new school year starting, what exactly would be the learning plan for students or my expectations as an educator. I learned that students would only be present 2 of 5 days and expected to learn from home the other 3 days. Now if I learned anything from last spring, it was that (many) students with special needs work better with in-person supports because they’re provided with reading or writing supports either in class or within a small group. Those supports are non-existent when learning from home. Why? Because logging online doesn’t happen without support or motivation. Although seeing my students at least 2 days a week was better than no days like last spring, knowing that I wouldn’t be seeing them consecutively was going to bring new challenges as it makes it difficult to build relationships and make connections one day and then pick up three days later. Thankfully I was granted the opportunity to bring in select students 3 or 4 days a week. I was ecstatic because I quickly saw their personalities shine through those darn face masks. Even better, they were making academic progress from this change in their learning plans and I finally started to feel like a teacher again.