Sonoma teacher report: Online education and the human experience

No summoning bell sounds. No one scores a surprise 3-point shot with a Coke can. No desks grate, no voices chatter, no pencils clatter. There’s just the efficient - almost noiseless - ding of new participants logging on to the virtual class.

There are other things missing as well. There are no clues to what happened yesterday. No desks slightly out of line because they had been previously arranged into a Socratic circle, a jury box or a Reader’s Theater. No mind maps or word wheels posted to the walls or dangling from the ceilings. No evidence of the collective imagination.

In fact, there’s no evidence of people. No mistakes. No misbehavior. No disciplinary referrals. With one click, the human element can be muted. No ticking time tolls the hour. Class starts when the students and teachers are ready.

This spring, Sonoma Valley High School took technology to the limit and went completely online for the very first time.

In one fell swoop, almost everything - curriculum planning, instruction, assessment - changed. Teachers, who are always innovators, met the challenge: virtual museum tours and online labs, do-it-at-home geometry, breakout sessions, and more. Recently, I had some time to gather a few reflections. Here’s what the teacher “in the hall” had to say.

On keeping students engaged

Asked to reflect on his experience with online instruction this semester, Dean Knight, chemistry and physics teacher and recipient of several teacher-of-the year awards, immediately recalled some of his happiest moments teaching - which happened not to be online. For example, he spearheaded the People-to-People Youth Science Exchange in Russia in the 1990s, invaluable because of the lasting personal connections that were made. He also emphasized the importance of building collegial relationships with students outside of the classroom, recalling the fun he had with a group when they monitored radio wave frequency of the Mir space station while on a campout.

Obviously, Knight is no critic of technology. He already incorporates lab simulations into his normal course curriculum. But now that students have been quarantined, he finds such tools not only helpful but necessary to keep students engaged. Knight, who has taught for over four decades, predicts that some of the practices teachers are using and developing now to engage students remotely will become a part of their normal day-to-day professional lives.

Sarah Gaschler, who has been on the faculty since 2017, finds that something as simple and old-school as the kitchen island can be made into a math problem. Reflecting on the adage that “math is all around us,” she brings it home. Gaschler teaches Algebra 1 and geometry.

“I want to use this experience to see: what has excited students about math,” she says. “In the first week of distance learning I had my students take pictures of angles in their house. I have been engaging kids in ways they didn’t get to do normally in our curriculum.”

Like Gaschler, Christopher Anspach, an SVHS teacher of seven years, also sees this period of distance learning as, if not an outright opportunity, an opportunity to experiment with his students in Bridge to Geometry and Applications of Advanced Mathematics.

Using technical argot himself, he says teaching remotely is “like a sandbox,” meaning that he can “experiment with building and creating different routes for kids to contribute to and engage in the curriculum.”

Teachers who teach electives, as opposed to those who teach core courses, face a different challenge when it comes to student engagement at a distance. Even a veteran teacher in multimedia, like Peter Hansen, whom you would think has all the magic tricks up his sleeve, admits that online can be difficult.

“Right now we are studying advertising vs. marketing,” he says. “Normally it’s a really dry subject, but in my classroom, I can walk up to them, walk around, ask them questions, randomly call on some. Now I can’t do that. So I have to make sure my lessons are entertaining and relevant to their generation. Last week we looked at social media marketing. The essential question was: How does it matter to you? Give me an example of some company that is marketing to you because of your recent social media activity. I’m getting good responses that are well thought-out, but I’m not getting enough of them.”

New teachers, who were already experimenting and developing their styles, find themselves experimenting within an experiment. Scott Steinberg in the social studies department teaches World Geography and Cultures.

“(At first) I started putting together agendas and a warmup, and it started to resemble a regular but engaging classroom experience,” Steinberg says. “We were doing Kahoots, virtual Four Corners, mini-debates like ‘What’s better: the fork or the spoon?’ And students totally wanted to be there.”

But as the novelty wears off, and distance learning takes over, the strategies don’t always work.

That being said, Hansen emphasizes that “our teachers feel an extreme responsibility to continue to teach, and they are committed to learning new approaches to doing it, with new technology. The dedication of the teachers is so impressive.”

What’s missing

But Andy Gibson, social studies department chair, sums it up.

“I’m still doing my best to be a virtual version of me, but it’s hard. You feed off the energy in the classroom, that productive noise, where it’s not crazy but it’s not quiet either. (Now) the students laugh, (but only) virtually. For me, that’s the hardest part. Education is a people business. You can’t replicate it online.”

There are other obstacles as well. As my uncle, a parent from Redwood City notes, it is hard to motivate his senior, whose plans for next year are already set, to study now. Ruminating about the uncertain future, he is also concerned that if online education becomes a larger part of the curriculum, problems with significant cheating may emerge.

Gibson points out that school has always been, and still is, the great equalizer in the United States. It’s part of democracy.

“When students come to school, this is what they do: they are here from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.; they don’t have to go to work; the teachers and the school have materials they can use that some don’t necessarily have access to at home, like charcoal and clay for Jonathan Beard’s art class, and iPad technology for Andy Mitchell’s graphic design class. When you take away the physical location of school, it lays bare all those inequalities.”

In his poem, “Birches,” Robert Frost wrote, “Earth’s the right place for love / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” The same could be said for education. The classroom is the best place for a human education experience.

The students, too, have eloquently voiced an opinion. On Saturday, walkers at the high school would have seen the poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold chalked on the bike path that parallels the basketball court. The anonymous chalker is believed to be a student of long-time Sonoma Valley High School English teacher, Mary Spragens, who teaches Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451” and requires that the class memorize “Dover Beach.” In the novel, Matthew Arnold’s poem symbolizes the protagonist-rebel’s protest against the dangers of uncontrolled technology. Online education lacks “the natural touch.”

Abigail Jennings teaches English at Sonoma Valley High School.