Work From Home For Teachers? Yes, These Innovative Folks Are Making It Happen During Corona

With the coronavirus pandemic halting schools, let’s celebrate our work-from-home teachers who are keeping the learning going!

It’s come to this! Work From home for teachers! Who in the flesh and blood world would have imagined that our schools would be shut and teachers would have to go the virtual way?

That the stock of chalk for teaching would turn to cheese and those modules on experiential learning would turn into experimental endeavours. That classroom arrangements would be flipped to the study room or on to dining tables at home. That cupboards at home would hold the anchor charts and the so far discouraged ‘screen time’ would come to the rescue of the teacher-student connect!

Brave and innovative schools have begun to implement ‘virtual classrooms’. Their pioneering teaching staff has already got the virtual class rolling, not just for the senior students but for the junior children too! In this new adventure, parents are anxious, children are excited and the teachers are eager.

Anxious parents, is understandable. This is the time for new sessions, but they see children at home with an unstructured day plan. Children are excited because they are virtually hanging out with their teachers and parents are not raising eyebrows over excessive screen time. Teachers were away from their young learners. New dynamics have kindled some hope of interacting with the bubbly souls, albeit remotely.

In these trying times, parents are looking up to teachers with hope as well as impatience. The parent community’s worries are genuine – how will the teacher teach my 4-year-old child, will she be able to build a human connect virtually, how will she enable building bonds with the new classmates?

Teaching is an immediate consumption service, and a few years back ‘work from home’ was unthinkable in this space. The teacher’s selfless service is consumed by young minds, so a personal and contextual connect is always important in teaching. Besides the medical fraternity, only educators come close to the ‘caregivers’ category.

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While Family is Hiding (another WFH!), teachers are sitting pretty in front of the cameras and doing all the prep before they send those Google invitees and emails. They are transporting their homes into mini classrooms, so that the learning process is uninterrupted.

Recording book reading sessions, creating beautiful art and craft, giving short lectures on numeracy, EVS, English and tweaking the subject plans to adjust to the need of the time are some of the tools teachers are using to engage with the toddlers. Educators are extra prepared with worksheets, practice material and text sharing. True to the tenets of being a real teacher, even in this chaos, teachers are cognisant of student’s work accountability; sessions are followed by regular feedback and reflections.

In this moment of crisis, teachers are the anchors for their students. Whilst their own children may be rolling in a bowl of porridge or bundled away in one corner of the house, lest they make noise, teachers are gearing up to welcome the new batch of first time school goers wearing a big smile. Sans the mask and with the head phones on!

Image via Unsplash

First published at author’s blog

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