Teachers are struggling to hear students through their face masks as if they have gone “deaf”, Tes has learned.
As schools have opened to all pupils this week with a strong recommendation that secondary students wear face masks, teachers have taken to social media to express their frustrations.
One secondary teacher said: “I’ve found that I’m suddenly feeling very deaf. Most of my students mumble through their words as it is. I had to keep asking them to repeat themselves.
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“I’ve told them nod/shake their head as a visual clue, but mostly I just check in with them more often to gauge understanding.”
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Another teacher, also commenting on social media website Reddit, said: “I had to ask a child to repeat themselves three times, still had no idea what they said. Ended up pretending to get it the last time because I just couldn’t ask again. Such a shame people don’t come with subtitles.”
Another said: “I’ve found using physical visual clues in a different way to gauge understanding helpful - ie, hands up (closed fist for partial understanding of a task/need help [and] open hand for ‘I know what to do’.)”
Another teacher, who said her hearing has deteriorated over the past few years, told Tes that students wearing masks had made the problem worse, and that she had asked her senior leadership team if her students would be allowed to lower their masks to ask a question, and that she was waiting for a reply.
She said: “If students are wearing masks in class and not allowed to lower them when asking me a question, which could be five metres away, I will not be able to hear or lip read.
“A suggestion is the student uses a whiteboard, but I am also short-sighted and students’ handwriting is not clear.”
MPs heard this week how headteachers were being threatened by parents after enforcing rules on face masks, while children’s minister Vicky Ford said masks were not being made mandatory in secondary school classrooms because some students will be “very anxious and nervous” about wearing them.
