A teacher in the lockdown! What does she do?

(Producto de la Semana 18 de Inglés, en "Aprendo en Casa")

Things have changed a lot during the pandemic, we all know. One of the most important things that have changed is the education; the quarantine forced us to take virtual classes that affect people in many different ways. Today we are going to take a look at how Jenny’s life has changed as a teacher.

Before all this

She’s Jenny, a 40 years old high school teacher from Ica. She’s very polite and pleasant with her students. Before the lockdown, she used to work with them in the classroom and make them participate in a lot of funny activities. She did it because she sees her students as her own children. She also enjoyed talking with other teachers after classes (some of them were even her friends from high school). “In this work, it is very important to have good and healthy relations with both colleagues and students. It will make you feel a lot better and it will improve your performance too”, she says.

Virtual teacher

But now things have changed, as we said before. Jenny’s work has changed and now she’s a virtual teacher. Now, she has to prepare her classes in the computer for hours and, when her students are ready for the class, she interacts with them through both computer and cellphone. After finishing the classes, her students send her their evidences and tasks via Group Chats in WhatsApp. Then, she classifies and archives them in Google Drive. Most of the time this turns out to be far more difficult than working in a classroom and taking the student’s works to home, especially when they forget to put their names in the photos or files (and so on when they… you know, copy their homework from someone else or the internet, or when they cheat in any other way).

Also, she has virtual meetings with her colleagues and the directives of her school at least once a week. For this, she has to prepare herself in advance (and sometimes there are complications in the meetings).

To sum it all up, the lockdown has changed a lot, and I mean a LOT of things for teachers and students, and not all the changes are always… positive.

However, as Jenny says, “This will end soon. Maybe it is difficult to accept and manage all the changes that arise, but we need to do our best if we want to return to our previous lives in a good physical and mental state, when all this is over”.



-Manuel

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"There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying".
Robert Evans (2002)