Education
Portland Magazine
August 27, 2020
Makamae Nottage ’20 was a student teacher at Holy Cross Catholic School when Portland schools went online. This year she is a member of the Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education (PACE) program and will be teaching in Salt Lake City, Utah. When she moved back to her home in Hawaii this spring because of COVID-19, she got up early (very early) to see her students through to the end of the year.
I was the only teacher in my classroom that day. So I had to be the one to tell the third-grade students that we’re not going to be coming to school for the rest of the month and we’re going to be doing classes online. They were just as confused as I was! It was so bizarre. They had about 30 questions. I told them, “I don’t know how to answer many of your questions, but I’m going to try.”
Some of the questions were kind of funny. “Can I wake up in my pajamas and do class in my bed?” “So, I just get to lie in my bed and watch Miss Martin and Miss Nottage teach?” And others were more serious: “Is this because of the virus?” “Is this because everything is shutting down?” Some of the students were really scared and really confused, because they were only in the third grade and really scared of the situation.
So, I told myself, “Your job is to make sure they’re not scared. Your job is to remain as calm as possible and to let them know this is okay, everything will be okay. We will still see each other, even if it’s through a screen.” Then that day, which was wild because we had to send them home with every one of their textbooks, each of them was carrying five textbooks in their arms plus a few more books in their backpacks. It was just so bizarre sending them home and thinking that we weren’t going to see them anymore, or for now. And then later that day I found out that UP was switching to online, and they told student teachers not to go to their placements anymore. They said, “You’re done, you don’t need to do online distance learning with your school, you basically passed.”
And I, in that moment, just told myself, “No I didn’t! I’m not ready! I can’t say goodbye to my kids!”
So, I talked with my lead teacher Brenda Martin, and I said, “I’m moving back to Hawaii because of everything that happened, and I still want to help teach these kids and be there.” She said “Absolutely!” So, I somehow managed to be at every Zoom call with our third graders, all the way from Hawaii, and help them with their learning.
The time difference was a challenge, but I wake up pretty early anyway, so it was fine. Another challenge was getting to help them, really, if they were struggling with something. We still tried to teach them math, we still tried to teach them or do reading together, and it was hard to make sure they were actually doing that, because they could just respond to Seesaw and say “I did it,” even though we may not know if they actually did the activity. But it was a challenge to know if they were struggling, if they weren’t understanding something in math. There were so many limitations.
I actually tutored one of my students twice a week. I worked with him to help him strengthen his multiplication and division, because we noticed that once everything changed, all of them were having problems memorizing their facts and understanding everything, so I worked with him twice a week to help him get his school work done. Whenever he would ask me questions, really about life, about the world, or about the content, we would go through that together. I really wanted to be there to support the students because I knew what they needed inside the classroom. I still wanted to help them learn.
In a way the Zoom format helped me learn about them at a deeper level. I learned more about their interests on the Zoom calls. They were all given chances to share about, say, their pets, and how their pets help them throughout the day. They took pictures of their animals doing things around the house throughout the day to sort of tell a story, and we just got to know what they like to do. They would show us some of the video games they were playing, and it was cool because we got to know them as a person and as a child rather than only as a student. So, I liked that aspect of it at least.
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