“Being a teacher after 12 March 2020 was not easy at all for those with a genuine conscience and a sense of duty towards their students,” said John*, an educator who has been teaching in state schools since 1996.

Over the past year, teachers have faced many hurdles and continue to face many more. One of these hurdles was the suddenness of the situation, however the major sad truth lies in the future of a number of students, he said.

John explained that there are a good number of students who have been culled by the digital divide which is a type of poverty that most are not aware of.

While there are some families who genuinely cannot afford to buy devices or to pay for internet, there are many others for whom these things are simply not a priority, even if they afford to get their nails done weekly or buy the latest trendy wheels for their fancy car, he said.

John added that, “many students have not been to school for a year.”

These include some students who live with vulnerable individuals or students who are vulnerable themselves. However, there are parents and guardians who for the past year have treated this situation as one of convenience and have looked at sending their child to school as an optional matter.

“These students are lost forever as there is no way anyone can recuperate them. They’ve been free for too long,” John said.

“We found ourselves at home with our devices and most of us couldn’t even go to school to get resources and materials we had prepared over the years,” he said.

John added that a large proportion (if not all) of teachers had little or no knowledge of the different online platforms available and there was a general sense of willingness to keep teaching, but at the same time a helplessness and frustrating feeling of inadequacy and of being totally lost.

“While private schools had a structured and organised system in place and literally moved smoothly to online teaching over a weekend, state schools were caught unprepared,” he said.

Along with the challenge of learning how to use the new platforms, many families had a list of other hurdles.

John recalled how, together with his wife, who is also a teacher, and his children, he had to find a way to follow their lessons online from home.

One can only imagine the struggle of having two teachers trying to provide online lessons to their students, while at the same time helping their children with their own online lessons.

“This was a nightmare as like many other services, internet service proved to be not up to it, thus online lessons were terrible and very frustrating,” he said.

With some teachers going out of their way and some even continuing online lessons during the Summer period, it was still very difficult to tackle the lack of lessons, explanation, feedback or otherwise for some subjects.  

John described this experience as being “a total nightmare as, apart from dealing with our teaching loads we also had to deal with the needs of staying at home like cooking, cleaning and so on, but at least there was the satisfaction of seeing those students who actually followed making progress and appreciating the work that was being done.”

The way the three sectors – private, church and state schools – dealt with this situation varied greatly. Over the summer, private schools used the time wisely to prepare different action plans for eventual scenarios, church schools opted to work on Microsoft Teams, whilst state schools “seemed to just keep hoping for the best like a young child saying to himself ‘it will be alright... wait and see.’”

John remarked that it was a very difficult journey to arrive to where we are today because “at least we are now working on a single platform which is working successfully for those students who are following.”

Despite this progress, the internet service at school is still “inadequate” and many teachers end up using their after-work hours to upload ‘heavy’ material from home as the network at school does not cope. For the same reason, live lessons are “risky and a gamble,” he said.

 

*Name has been changed since the interviewee did not feel comfortable going on record.