Portland Magazine
Alumni
Education
July 14, 2020
Renee Espinoza graduated from UP in 2009, then went on to get her master’s in curriculum and instruction with an ESL endorsement in 2010. She went to work for Portland Public Schools that year and currently teaches second grade at Astor Elementary School, mere blocks from the UP campus in North Portland. She teaches a variety of subjects—reading, science, and others—but her true love is teaching mathematics to kids in the younger elementary groups. We reached out to Renee to share her insights and experiences during the switch to distance learning in March 2020.
I miss seeing the kids and having those relationships with them. I met with my students online every day, but a lot of them weren’t necessarily comfortable on the computer. There were at least 10 kids that I wasn’t seeing every day. What I ended up doing in those meetings was a read-aloud. I read Harry Potter to my students for the last few weeks, and they really enjoyed that.
And they made connections to what is going on with the Black Lives Matter movement. Part of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets involves Harry learning about “Mudbloods,” kids that are Muggle-born, their families aren’t magical or they’re only half-magical. A lot of the Slytherins don’t like the Mudbloods, and as we were reading that, one of my students stopped me and said, “That’s kind of like people in the Black community right now; they’re being treated poorly,” and he just made that connection. We had another student thank him for making that connection and bringing it up, so that was a very proud moment for me. I was so excited to see that.
It gets back to how much I miss having great conversations with the kids. I always tried to incorporate different cultures into the classroom, and the conversations that would come up as we were reading and having kids relate lessons to life. Yes, academics are important, but so is teaching the students to be kind to one another, and being empathetic, and having all that social and emotional learning in the classroom. Those things have been especially hard online. I can have them read a book and talk about kindness, but they can’t actually put it into practice now because they’re not together with their classmates and their friends, practicing their problem-solving. That’s probably my teaching philosophy right there, that it’s not just about the books and math and all that, it’s about teaching kids how to be compassionate human beings in this world, and distance learning makes it a lot harder to teach that.
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