“Ms Rose, have you ever discovered anything in the bath?”
The first call comes in at 6.59am. I don’t have to answer it but, given that my students can see that I’m online, uploading their assignments for the day, it would seem churlish not to.
“Like when you are bathing, Ms Rose.”
With no face-to-face interaction, I don’t have to hide my expression. Like what? A basking shark? A Soviet-era nuclear sub?
“I am learning about Archimedes. He made all of his discoveries in the bath.”
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When news of the coronavirus broke, I was on holiday in Vietnam. With flights cancelled, I couldn’t get back to China, so spent the first two and a half weeks of the new term teaching my class of nine-year-olds online from my hotel room. As teachers, we rely heavily on face-to-face interaction, so this has been something of a steep learning curve.
Some things are easy to adapt to - like wearing a face mask every day or making embarrassing videos to teach the finer points of Ancient Greek history. Pity the shocked member of housekeeping staff who walked into my hotel room to find me dressed in the bedsheet, holding forth as Euripides in front of my laptop.
Some are more difficult. Remembering to remove said mask before taking a sip of coffee, for example, proves a daily challenge. On the bright side, coffee-stained clothing is infinitely less noticeable on a computer screen than in real life.
Classroom management is proving a very different skill online. I may not worry about excess chatter, but I have had to introduce rules policing the use of emojis and GIFs. On the other hand, as a colleague recently reminded me, online we don’t have to deal with tears and snot.
One of the most positive aspects of learning online has been the way in which parents have got stuck in. Possibly because they too have been sequestered in their houses for over a month, parents are enjoying some of the assignments at least as much as their offspring. One student recently apologised to me that her video submission was late because “my dad got carried away building the set”.
At its heart, teaching is social interaction. We listen as much as we speak. We read body language and facial expressions as much as we read illegible book reports. This may look a little different online, but ultimately, my students are still learning. In fact, without the daily dramas of playground disagreements or lost shoes, some of them are excelling in unexpected ways.
At this age, we teach so much more than the three Rs: we teach kindness, patience, manners, cooperation - all skills that are needed as much, if not more, in a cyberclassroom than in the traditional bricks-and-mortar kind. And if nothing else, these children will come away from this experience knowing that it’s never OK to put dancing penguin emojis in a book report.
Joanna Rose teaches Grade 3 in an international school in China. She trained and previously worked in Scotland
