Valeria Guevara is in the 11th grade at East Hampton High School, Emma Kapon is in the fifth grade at the Bridgehampton School, Kaila Zeh-Gatti is in the seventh grade at the Montauk School, and Olive Guinan is a kindergartner at the John M. Marshall Elementary School. In age and as students, they are very different, but they have one thing in common: They all miss attending classes in person.
Schools in New York State have been closed since March 16 because of Covid-19 and will remain closed through at least April 29. Meanwhile, students statewide are getting crash courses in distance learning.
Teachers and friends alike are now faces and voices on computers, tablets, and phones. Lessons and activities have migrated to websites and videos. Each school’s approach to teaching varies, sometimes dramatically.
“Having to take online high school courses has been one of the strangest methods of learning that I’ve experienced,” said Valeria, whose classes include four Advanced Placement courses, pre-calculus, and journalism. “What I miss the most about school is face-to-face interactions with my teachers and other students. I also miss the traditional school environment: sitting at a desk and having to raise my hand whenever I had something to say.”
Emma agreed. “I like actual school better. Online school isn’t as interactive as regular school is. You can’t really ask teachers questions — you have to wait a good amount of time for them to comment, unless you’re on a video call.”
Many teachers are helping their own children with lessons even as they lead classes online. Olive, who is in the dual language kindergarten class at John Marshall, has “appropriate, fun, and engaging” lessons that are also “manageable and flexible enough for a working parent,” said her mother, Beth Doyle, who happens to be the school principal. “I appreciate that very much.”
“We all miss being in school!” Ms. Doyle continued. “The teachers are so dedicated to their students; their hearts are breaking that they cannot be with them. The feedback has been very positive, but this way of teaching can never replace the connection that is needed between students and teachers, and students and their peers. Our mission is twofold: academics, social-emotional learning. How do you teach the latter through a computer screen?”
John Marshall teachers are reporting a student participation rate of about 85 percent, according to Ms. Doyle.
In the Kapon household, Emma is not the only one trying to learn online. She has two older siblings, Sarah, a seventh grader, and Hugo, a ninth grader. (They call their dog, Sheba, “the kindergarten class.”) Emma works downstairs in the house; Sarah and Hugo work upstairs in their rooms. “Sometimes there are people walking through or talking, or there’s the dog,” Emma said.
James Kapon, their father, said that “each grade is kind of getting a different course of action” at the Bridgehampton School. “The high school is clearly being given the priority, as probably well it should,” he said. “Most people are finally coming to the conclusion that this will most likely be for the rest of the school year.”
He said his children have the Wi-Fi bandwidth and tech tools they need for school, but acknowledged that that is not universally true. In fact, the Bridgehampton School has had to rely on donations of Chromebook laptops provided by private donors and the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center.
Ana Alanis’s son, John Cabrera, who is in second grade at the Wainscott School, is getting antsy. “He is fine when his teacher calls him and asks him to do things,” said his mother. “After doing two or three things he says, ‘That’s it, can I have a break?’ He goes outside. He runs around. He goes in the fridge and finds something to eat, then comes back. At school, he can stay in the same spot for a longer period and listen to the teacher, and there are other kids around who are doing the same thing.”
In Montauk, Kaila was surprised to be given homework for her chorus class, but New York State requires instruction to continue in each subject. The same applies to gym class; kids are supposed to log their physical activity, and it’s largely on the honor system. Some schools are sending art supplies home.
Kaila, who spends between two and three hours on her schooling each day, hasn’t had many tests. “I get to learn at my own pace and it’s less hours, but I don’t like it over all,” she said. “I miss my friends, and I feel like I get a better grasp on the subject if someone’s teaching me rather than if I’m teaching myself.”
Sarah, the Bridgehampton seventh grader, is mostly okay with distance learning, because, she said, she can sit up in bed doing the work. “It’s hard to do chorus and band from home,” though. “It’s also hard on Google Meet when we have our actual classes, because a lot of the time a teacher ends up getting disconnected or it’s all chaos.”
Her brother, for one, is used to distance learning. Hugo had already been taking college courses online. Still, he said, “I feel like it’s more stressful. We’re doing this more independently, because at school we’d get a lot of help with a topic. In online classes you can’t get that sort of help that you need.”
“If we had to, I’d do this again. I don’t hate it, but I don’t like it, mainly because it’s school.”
Hugo studies, on average, three hours a day, but for Valeria, the junior at East Hampton High, it’s more like 10 hours. “Due to the courses I’m taking, I struggle a lot not having the traditional schedule and discipline,” she said. “There is also a lot more work now since there are things I have to sit down and teach myself when I don’t necessarily understand the lecture . . . I have not had enough time to sit down and enjoy being at home. I’ve been waking up at around 6 a.m. to get in two hours of exercise daily.”
When the schools closed, that was when the reality of Covid-19, for children, seems to have set in. “I knew Montauk would be affected a little bit,” Kaila said, “but if you told me our school was going to be shut down for this long, I’d say you were crazy.”
This is the first in a two-part series about distance learning.