Balancing in a bubble by Josh Benoza

BALANCING IN A BUBBLE

JOSH BENOZA says communication is essential to survive COVID.

The fears of lockdowns and the quietness of the streets gave me a lingering fear for my future as a student.

All this, while we continued to study with multiple deadlines due the next day. The living room became my school, my house became my entire world and everything changed in an instant. For months, students just like me became imprisoned in the walls of our homes. Many students suffered due to the radical changes that came with this new environment.

For weeks I kept myself trapped in my bubble, trying to work my way through the hours of schoolwork. I felt lonely when I received no messages from my friends. Thankfully, my experience in lockdown did not lead to me failing my exams, but for some students, this could have been the case.

I believe that communication is essential for us as students or even teachers if another insurmountable barrier such as lockdown comes into place again. For my family, the 1pm news report became a tradition. Honourable Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Former Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield and Minister of Health, Chris Hipkins flooded my family’s screens. For months I was deprived of social interaction, only able to talk to my family. As a student, this significantly impacted my ability to learn. Most notably, during times when there were less regular Zoom lessons. Yet, I was only able to see my experience of education in lockdown, my experience as a student.

So I asked Mr Martin Willetts, our school’s Middle School Leader and Assistant Headmaster two questions, to find out about his experience with educating during lockdown.

MR MARTIN WILLETS

Q. What issues did you find as a teacher during the lockdowns and everything else that occured during 2020-2021?

A. The biggest issue was keeping students motivated and maintaining a high standard of work. Communication with parents helped but so many of them were working from home or were essential workers so they weren’t able to check up on their children, especially during school hours. A lot of students handed in good work, so a side effect was that students could do work on their terms and when they wanted during the day which I thought was interesting.

Q. What problems were you faced with when getting through these changes?

A. The fact that we as teachers couldn’t give instant feedback to boys was annoying. Also, for a teacher keeping track of all of the emails, zoom meetings, assessments, classwork, communication with families and their issues and reporting back to school and showing that we are still making an educational difference to our students. All of these added to stress levels and at times impacted our families and the way we could help them. People seem to forget that teachers and our families were going through this as well.

After this interview, I realised that the education system during lockdown was disruptive, abrupt and chaotic in many ways. In all fairness, New Zealand as a whole was unprepared for COVID-19 as was most of the world. Now, we have seen the way that lockdowns affect our behaviours and how most people deal with them.

How do we improve? There is no clear answer to this question, but there are multiple choices we can make. For my family, we did our best to interact. I talked to my parents more regularly and texted my friends almost daily. Even seeing my science teacher’s face gave me some feeling of being in a classroom. My interactions with other people helped me get the hang of lockdown learning, and keep track of my busy schedule.

With the experiences we have gained in the past 2 years, it is fair to say that we have no excuses. We have experienced first-hand the problems that arise through events such as lockdown and we know what we can do to fix them. I believe when the next hurdle faces us, we will know what to do because we have the expertise and knowledge to jump over these issues. We all have a role to rebuild the fractures that COVID left behind.