Lessons from a Pandemic

In March of 2020, like many students, I attended my final undergraduate class… without realizing it.

There were rumblings of a novel coronavirus and some students were already taking precautions against viral infections—the usual smattering of medical masks worn on campus had increased by a factor of two, and busses were decidedly less talkative. By pure coincidence, my final in-person class was ENGL 378: Contemporary British Literature, taught by Dr. Miguel Mota. Dr. Mota had also taught my gateway program into UBC, an 18-credit “Arts One” class, and was an extremely influential force in my transition into undergraduate life. I distinctly remember sitting in the front row on an unusually warm March day, our Buchanan D classroom windows wide open, listening to this incredible professor lead us through a discussion of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, and thinking “gosh golly goodness, I am incredibly lucky to be in this environment with teachers and students who equally care about discovering new meaning from beautiful works.”

Sometimes the stars align for the beacons we set, no?

The changing world necessitated a change of plans.

I had already accepted an offer of admission from Boston University, but the desire to stay closer to home caused me to pursue graduate studies at my older brother’s alma mater—Western Washington University. The Woodring College of Education welcomed me and a cohort of 18 other young adults into the Secondary Education program with open arms, and we spent the next one and a half years learning with, laughing with, and leaning on one another for necessary support. I met some of the smartest people I have ever had the joy to interact with during this time, and will forever thank Woodring for connecting me with these amazing teachers.

This incredibly unprecedented educational environment changed a lot about the skills I honed in graduate school.

Neither our graduate classes nor our practicum and student teaching experiences could be in person until the autumn of 2021 at the earliest, meaning that our first moments being in positions of authority in a classroom were lived through Zoom. This added an entirely new layer of learning: how, if at all, would the skills we had already been discussing in our graduate classes transfer over to this new virtual environment? If we found something that works well there, would it transfer back into the physical classroom once in-person restrictions were relaxed? And, perhaps most importantly: would we, as the first generation of teacher preparation students ever forced to layer on additional task complexity based on the realities of distanced education, gain something from this specific reality that none before had the opportunity to gain?

Some things are returning to how they were before, but the applicable skills from this time will forever be in our knowledge banks.

While I would have traded experiencing a global pandemic for having a more “normal” environment to first learn teaching skills within in a heartbeat, the unshakeable truth remains that without this strange, new, terrifying, uncomfortable, and often traumatic experience, my cohort and I would have never learned to teach within our post-pandemic world. While middle and high school students in particular have battled against mental health issues and high academic expectations for decades, the current hardships our students are facing are new, multifaceted, and difficult to navigate for all parties involved. Much of my education at Woodring and UBC Vancouver was steeped in empathy building and social justice consideration. Each and every day I thank my teachers for focusing on meeting students at their level.

Students are attempting to overcome many obstacles. Within such a complicated landscape, it is crucial that our students are taught by teachers who know what distanced learning is like, what methods work the best in managing classroom expectations within a culture touched by collective trauma, and how we as a society can move forward in our new educational system, forever marked by the lived realities of a global health crisis.