Teacher - Student relationships in Covid times #8weeksofsummer week 1

 

This post is week 1 of 8 in the #8WeeksofSummer Blog Challenge for educators.

Who could imagine our life this year?

Things have definitely changed in every field. More work from home, people stopped going out, some of us became more introverts than usual, some others acted like they were in prison.

A lot of people got sick. A lot of people died. A lot of people survived.

What about education? This has changed as well.

Remote teaching and learning has existed for many years now, although some people never thought of it as "real education".  As I write in my last post, a lot of people, especially in my country are afraid of technology. 

As a result, there were teachers who refused to learn new things and their work suffered. There were also teachers though who kept learning and adapting with wonderful results.

How about human communication though? 

Some people insist that the connection they have had with their students has been lost. Especially with the younger students.

The truth is that kinaesthetic activities were somehow limited. Though the communication was never lost.

What I did to keep in touch with my students?

• Using Viber, What's up, e-mail , Facebook messenger, my students and I could exchange opinions, I was able to help them with things they could not understand and with their homework, we even chatted a bit, especially with my teens and adults
• Communication with parents was more frequent. I sent them emails with their childrens projects and evaluation and talked on the phone almost every week to solve technical issues and give them advice on how to help their children at home.
• Organised online meetings with them to do projects.
• Organised meetups in person to go for long wallks and talk about problems they face with their learning
• Organised meetups to feed the strays in our neighbourhood (and also working an a language project on that. 
• Still keeping in touch with most of them through the social media, planning small projects for Tik Tok.
• Students from other places still got the chance to participate in all of the above through skype.

You see, things are not that bad. Was it tiring to be in front of a camera all day? Yes. Was it exhausting to keep up with technology? Yes.

Did all this give us the opportynity to widen our audience and communicate in a more meaningful way. Yes again.

So, personally speaking, my communication with my students got better this year. 

I can't wait to read other teachers' views.