Centerspread

Back on schedule

While many students and faculty chose to return to campus Sept. 8, others opted to remain at home for the forseeable future. And although the administration and faculty have meticulously adapted the campus and curriculum, there have been some setbacks along the way. What are these issues, and how can we solve them?

TUNING IN Virtual students have varying levels of participation in their classes: Some directly involve and incorporate online individuals with creative flair, while others leave students as mere spectators in the classroom, isolated from their normal learning environment.

While the return to campus has been largely successful, there have been mixed results in the experiences of students who have opted to learn virtually.

For Anna Lambert –– a Brookhaven College computer science instructor and mother of four, including seventhgrader Lola Lambert and senior Isabella Lambert at Hockaday, sophomore Oliver Lambert at St. Mark's and Dominic Lambert '17 at Vanderbilt University –– remote education provided unexpected benefits in her children's learning. After months of deliberation over the summer, the Lamberts decided to keep all three of their school-age kids are home. "We did want to hear their input," Anna said, "and we definitely thought it was a difficult decision for Isabella and Lola, because it's Lola's first year [at Hockaday], and she hasn't even been on campus at her new school. So we knew that was going to be difficult. And Isabella, being in her senior year –– that's a big deal to not go to school your senior year."

As for Oliver, though, his mother noticed that he seemed to do better online than in-person because of a reduced commute, reduced pressure, and reduced distractions. "It could take an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the evening," Anna said, "and from the time they leave to the time they're back at the house, that could be three hours extra to do homework or to relax or sleep."

Remote learning has also provided a chance for more reserved students like Oliver to learn in a secure environment, separated from socially overwhelming circumstances. "Being comfortable at home, I've noticed that he opens up a lot more," Anna said. "Something about the setting –– he's speaking up a lot more than he used to. He's not intimidated by the classroom. I can hear him sometimes if he's close by, and I think, 'Is that the same Oliver?' He's so much more confident."

But the Lamberts have also noticed great differences in the remote learning systems between St. Mark's and Hockaday. For instance, whereas Hockaday records each class for both remote and in-person students to watch back later, St. Mark's does not. "At least for St. Marks," Anna said, "it's been a little bit more difficult now than it was when everybody was online. It seemed like the teachers were really focused when everyone was virtual, and they really wanted to make sure it worked for everybody. But it's much harder now to focus on two sets of students, especially when one is much smaller than the other."

Senior Max Palys, along with eighth grader Lucas Palys, have also opted to stay home for the foreseeable future on account of his internship at Georgetown’s Global Health Center for Science and Security before COVID-19 hit, where he analyzed both infectious diseases and how governments handle them. “The person who is my boss [Dr. Rebecca Katt] is on [Vice President Mike] Pence's Coronavirus Task Force,” Palys said. “She definitely knows what's going on, and I trust her, and she was pulling her hair out when she realized that people were going back to school. She was like, 'This is not what we should be doing.' That was her expert opinion.

As schools opened up, case numbers spiked, something Palys and many others quickly noticed. Combined with the fact that Palys’s father and stepbrother have preexisting conditions, the choice to stay home was clear.

“I didn't want to contribute to the spread of an outbreak, especially when there's vulnerable members in the community, such as older teachers or

Max Palys Senior my parents,” Palys said. “We need to act in a way that is safe for the whole community. Just because I necessarily might not be susceptible to the virus, that doesn't mean that the people around me are the same way.” And while Palys acknowledges the incredible efforts that faculty and staff have taken to enable a return to campus, there have been several consistent, systematic issues for virtual students that Palys urges the administration to address.

“Take my econ class. Econ is very graph based, and there's a lot of times that my teacher wants to draw things on the board, but I can't see them,” Palys said. “In my math class, Mr. Milliet will constantly change the camera, because he has different cameras set up, and he'll change from the PDF to the whiteboard camera to whatever else he needs to do. And he will always wait and make sure that I'm hooked up and that I can see what the students in the classroom are seeing. But if you asked me who's in my calculus class, I could maybe tell you like three kids and

From textbooks to tablets to tripods: Creative changes across every classroom

Following a short transition period, students and faculty resumed oncampus classes on Sept. 8. While every classroom has seen the familiar addition of a tripod camera and daily Teams checkins, all classes have been individually affected by this format and have adapted in their own, unique ways.

Sophomore Sharang Vyas decided to stay home for the first quarter of the school year, attending his Acting 1 class with Tony Vintcent Fine Arts Department Chair Marion Glorioso-Kirby through an Ipad which serves as his “body” as he practices his monologue for upcoming fall production of Spoon River Anthology. Despite being a movement-based class, Drama has had a surprising level of interaction for him.

“It's much slower from my side, a lot more watching than participating in most classes,” Vyas said, “but some teachers are doing a good job keeping us involved in everything. They've definitely done a good job on accommodating us. In Drama there's a lot of interaction in comparison to some other classes where we just watch the class go on. Mrs. Glorioso has done a really good job with including online people in pretty much everything.”

Classes that rely largely on conversation and communication also struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy. Senior Max Palys, alongside three other students in English instructor Geoffery Stanbury’s AP English Literature and Composition class, struggled in his first few English discussions, as the Teams software used to host discussions was insufficient to handle multiple people speaking at once or quieter voices.

“But it has improved with time in English,” Palys said, “because a few other kids in our English class and I had a conversation with Mr. Stanbury about what we could do better. Now we have the chat bar up on the screen, and we wave when we want to speak, which is unorthodox and strange but definitely gets the job done better.”

And while STEM classes are mostly lecture based, even they have been subject to changes. Founders Master Teaching Chair Doug Rummel has changed from lecturing at the front of the class with the whiteboard to leading his lessons in the back room on his tablet to account for the social distancing policies.

“On top of that, all of our labs are virtual now,” Rummel said. “For the motion labs, we're using Logger Pro. And the idea is, they take out their cameras, and we just capture the motion. So basically, if you get a cell phone, you effectively can do a large number of the labs. You can pretty much gather all that data you used to collect with the sensors.”

Director of Libraries and Information Services and Upper School Choir Director Tinsley Silcox has has adapted by moving rehearsals outside. The efficacy of a choir specifically mandates, possibly more than any other pursuit, that a group of people be together in a shared space, so when COVID-19 threatened that normalcy, part of the power of that group was lost. "Singing is normal," Silcox said. "It's comforting. How many people could stand up and give a testimony to their religious faith, or stand up and talk about romantic love or loving their parents or loss? It's hard. But if you take 20 people, and you put them in a room and you have music and you express these emotions through music together, it becomes a transformative experience. It's why I've devoted my life to it. Without it, it feels incomplete. A little hollow."

that's it.” can spell disaster.

While the administration took extensive preparatory measures over “But when you look at it, the standards they came up with to mitigate the summer to train and acclimate teachers to this new environment, risk that is like the Honor Code,” Rummel said. “If you feel like the Honor the sheer number of technical difficulties and struggles on a daily basis Code is a core principle of the institution that if people don't obey our indicates that further assistance is required for teachers to adequately code, if there is blatant, out in the open cheating, it starts to corrode that support virtual students. institutional value and then over time people no longer feel like it has a

“I don't place any blame whatsoever on my teachers. It's quite the ring to it. It undermines what we stand for. My fear about a lot of things opposite,” Palys said. “I speak so highly of all of my teachers and the going on here this fall is not so much about the fact that we're going to strides that they've taken to ensure that the remote experience is good. change our safety protocols, but there's going to be more of that social And I am so thankful for all of them because, frankly, I feel like they picked corrosion. Two guys out of 100 breaking the rules, it'll make a difference in up the slack the administration left us. The administration did not really the health of the community.” give, as far as I'm concerned, very many rules or guidelines for teachers to Despite his wife Kerrin’s autoimmune condition which makes her address kids who are remote outside of 'Here's a webcam, and here's a mic. especially at risk to COVID-19, Rummel has returned to campus to Have fun,'” resume teaching in-person. To minimize any possible safety concerns, they have decided to split their house in two as a safety precaution for the While having to teach students that are remote was already tricky enough, foreseeable future. some teachers who have chosen to stay home out of safety concerns have “She'll cook me dinners, and I make my own lunches and breakfasts,” needed to respond to a complicated dynamic after the first two weeks of Rummel said. “Got another coffee machine, almost like it's like a dorm school: a remote teacher in a class with in- room. I've got a microwave and a fridge and person students. For Victor F. White Master Teaching Chair David Brown, the procedure of his English 10 and English 12 classes keep It may seem like a pain, but what it comes down to is not just you, but boxes of cereal and snacks. And we do a lot of yelling across the house at times, but we do FaceTime every night as well. And if I get sick, needing to be tweaked as the year progresses. your grandmother, or the guy you’re she's not going to come over to take care of me.

“After the first two weeks of the year, it's sitting next to in history, or the gal I'm on my own. It's just me. So she said, 'I'm been more difficult for me now that students are on-campus and I am off, because we are on different footing,” Brown said. “The sound is worse, because they all have their laptops open; there are problems with feedback; there are lost connections that I didn't experience when everyone was remote. So technically it that’s bagging groceries, or the guy who’s driving the buses, or even more importantly the cleaning crew at night. They put themselves at risk to feed their families, and I would like to not letting you be alone like that.' So we got an Echo Show, the video conference one, as well.” But the biggest risk to school being forced to close is faculty falling ill. If too many teachers are unable to remain on campus –– either out of safety concerns or because they tested positive –– then no one will be able to 16,17 seemed more consistent when everybody was think that we’d care about that. supervise classes in person. John Ashton Associate Headmaster remote.” Hybrid learning complicates every element of an English class in a way that doesn’t affect other academic areas, and in a class that includes a breadth of different methods of learning –– reading and writing, discussions and conferences –– Brown finds himself missing out on several key activities. “How do you manage academic integrity for students who are at home?” Brown said. “Some compromises have happened, because students at home have more readily available temptations to compromise their integrity.” Because of these temptations, Brown has done away with weekly vocabulary and reading quizzes to remove the opportunity for academic dishonesty. So until the day he can be in person again, these restrictions and missed opportunities will continue. “I'm waiting for a vaccine, of course; I'm also waiting for medical experts and authorities to convincingly announce that the threat is so diminished that returning to such large groups is safe, even for those who've been at risk. There's sort of a hush-hush about things: protecting people's identities, in regards to how accurate numbers are. It's a tough call to make, and I'm doing the best I can to maintain my professional responsibilities while protecting my family.” But with a vaccine not likely to arrive until the next calender year, minimizing all possible spread is both the community and our country’s greatest responsibility, which brings into question whether or not we should be on campus at all. Founders Master Teaching Chair Doug Rummel emphasizes the necessity of each and every member of the community adhering to these guidelines, as even the smallest difference “I'm living 15 days worth of risk [compared to a student] every day at St. Mark's,” Rummel said, “and for people that are over 70 it's like 40 days of risk. So for me it's not that bad, but you can't have this institution if you have X number of faculty not coming into the classroom. I felt like we could do this safely by keeping a parallel life with my wife for the year. But you're going to have teachers go down and get sick, and when the flu comes, you've got even more people out. The mathematics show us that it's going to be worse in November and December, certainly. So any institution that wants to stay afloat is going to have to figure out how to keep everybody safe, because once it starts, it's exponential.” To guarantee that the school may operate safely, Rummel urges everyone to consider how they can improve the systems already in place to further reduce any possible spread to prepare for the likely uptick in cases in the following months. “In a corporation, when you've got equipment on the assembly line and you're trying to figure out how to make the product better,” Rummel said, “you're always looking back: 'Okay, what was it that worked this week? What can we improve?’ And the problem is we're on the rails now. We're not going back and doing quality control and figuring out if we're doing okay, and part of it is metric gathering. You got to have the data because contract tracing has absolutely no validity if you don't know where anybody's sitting at lunch. That's our biggest risk. We're all six feet apart, but we're not always staying that way all the time.” We heard your questions regarding the new mixed-learning system on campus — from tech difficulties to lunchroom shenanigans — and let Headmaster David Dini and Associate Headmaster John Ashton respond to each of them directly. Your questions, their answers Doug Rummel, Founders Master Teaching Chair STORY Jamie Mahowald, Luke Piazza PHOTO ILLUSTRATION Jerry Zhao “The most consistent thing that you’ve heard is the filter through which we are making the decision, which is [that we want] the safest environment we can create for you guys, all faculty and staff, every adult and our kitchen colleagues, on campus. Everything we think through goes Inconsistency in changes “We’re learning new things about the virus on a weekly basis, not because our best minds in the world aren’t thinking about this enough. but it speaks to complexities of this new virus. There will always be an element of chase with ways to mitigate it while we’re still learning about it. But human nature is human nature. Maintaining social distancing Perspectives The ReMarker • October 29, 2020 through that filter: ‘Is that an essential There’s not a single system yet to be thing to do, or is that a risk worth communicated or described or created yet taking?’ We keep looking at every week that will solve it. We’re unconsciously drawn and every day for how we can maximize to each other. So it’s a constant reminder, the programs in ways that we have not both from us to you and from you to yet been able to realize fully and fold us, always saying, ‘Hey guys, remember those things back in [the curriculum].” let’s spread out again.” That’s gonna be something we’ll just always have to do.

David Dini Headmaster

Limitations of online learning

“I can understand that at times it [virtual learning] is probably frustrating and less satisfying experience than if you were on campus. To suggest that everybody is going to be thrilled and happy with all the scenarios is unrealistic. And believe me, we spent pretty much every waking hour all summer trying to prepare for every possible scenario. But that was one of the things we were clear about from the very beginning [and was] why we asked every family to contact the division head where we very explicitly laid out what those expectations would be. Yes, we want to satisfy every experience to the greatest extent possible, but there are also limits, and what might work in one setting is going to be different in another.”

Health and safety concerns

“We went to significant lengths, in some cases beyond national standards, so that we felt like anything we could possibly do, we were going to explore doing. At the same time, we wanted to be mindful of the social and emotional impact, and so from our very first faculty meetings, we had Dr. Gabby and Nurse Julie side by side in every one of those sessions. We also have a Medical Advisory Committee, which has everything from neurologists to internal medicine [doctors] to pediatricians to psychiatrists and even the head epidemiologist for Dallas County Health Department. So we’re constantly seeking that feedback and guidance, and our goal has been to try to filter down the risk profile the best we could.”