How is online schooling affecting teachers?

Optimizing Online Schooling [Part 3/5] How is online schooling affecting teachers?

Education
Vishwajeet Borate1,640 Comments on Optimizing Online Schooling [Part 3/5] How is online schooling affecting teachers?

In the previous post, we have discussed the pain points of parents of students attending online school. Today we shall try to understand the pain of teachers who have been taking online classes of our children. Despite being the most critical stakeholder, they are the most silent and least discussed stakeholder of the school education system in the current scenario.

How is online schooling affecting teachers?

I have been in the education field and associated with schools for the last 16 years and I have seen how much teachers enjoy teaching. I can say that no other job gives as much job satisfaction as a teacher’s job. Teachers love to teach and enjoy being with their students. They are empowered and passionate kings and queens when they are in the classrooms.

However, the current pandemic situation has kept them physically away from their students. Teaching has continued but the medium (online teaching) is not what they are trained for and experienced to do. Overnight, teachers had to adapt to teaching by looking at a faceless camera. There is no way a teacher can get the same satisfaction by taking an online class that she gets by teaching in a class full of students. Imagine how difficult it is for a pre-school teacher to teach online a little toddler who cannot focus on one thing for more than 2 minutes. Or, imagine the frustration of a teacher teaching a difficult concept in Science which she would have normally explained to her students in the laboratory through an experiment. It becomes a thankless job needing even more temperament and patience from them. Much of their lecture time goes into ensuring that every student’s camera is on, mikes are off, solving connectivity issues… The level of attention that a teacher can get in an online class is not even 50% of the attention she can get in the real classroom. The facial expressions and body language of her students in the classroom give her instant feedback about how her students are grasping whatever she is teaching. This feedback mechanism is almost absent in an online class. On top of that, the attendance of students in online classes was also quite less throughout the year. All these factors were highly de-motivating for a teacher. Even then, teachers have continued teaching online, trying to give their best possible efforts so that the education of students continued. Many teachers became technical experts, video makers and discovered creativity and innovation in themselves which they never knew they had in them!

As we saw yesterday, many parents were not willing to pay the school fees during the pandemic. As a result, the fees collections of schools suffered intensely. School managements were super quick to transfer the negative effect of these reduced fees collections to teachers. Most private schools across India have been paying about 50% salaries to their teachers and staff and even then teachers have been giving their best efforts to ensure that education for students continues even during these tough times. Many teachers across India had to leave their teaching profession and take up other jobs or temporary vocations as it was not possible for them to run their homes with reduced salaries.

It’s not that the efforts of teachers were reduced as a result of online teaching. Believe me, it takes more effort and time to make a video or conduct an online class than taking a lecture in the classroom. I can tell from my experience that teachers from my school along with their Principals and Vice-principals have been staying awake till late at night to ensure that the next day’s content is ready and I believe that it was the same case with all other schools. But these efforts of teachers were rarely realized by the parents.

The plight of Government teachers has been even worse. They have to do fieldwork (surveys, distributing medicines, spreading awareness, working in isolation centres) putting their own and their family’s lives at extreme risk. Some teachers have also lost their lives in this process.

You must have noticed that, unlike my earlier two posts which discussed the pain points of students and their parents, I have not been able to remain neutral and dispassionate while discussing the pain our teachers are undergoing. That is because as an educationist who has seen them putting efforts, I find it extremely difficult to be dispassionate about the plight of our teachers. My heart goes out to them and salutes their positive spirit. Their plight and their efforts during the pandemic have been the most ignored by the Government, the media and also by the parents.  But they are used to this…. They have been quietly doing their job of ensuring that somehow the education of over 300 million children across India continues without expectations of any appreciation, and gratitude. They will remain the unsung heroes of this pandemic.

Affect of pandemic on teachers

The previous articles have discussed the pain points of parents of students attending online school. In case you haven’t read them, you can read them here:

In the next post, we shall understand the pain points of the school management during this pandemic.

This series of posts was originally published for Dream School Education Services authored by Vishwajeet Borate. You can read the original article here:

https://dreamschool.in/how-is-online-schooling-is-affecting-teachers/

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