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Teachers, how has Covid-19 affected your students and classes long term?
I only know a handful of teachers personally, and I’m fascinated by their unique perspectives on how the pandemic affected their classrooms.
I’m curious how instruction adapted during 2020 and 2021 quarantine, how younger or older students were impacted by losing a year of socialization, and other remarkable or surprising changes that came from those years. How did it affect you personally? Were you happier teaching before covid and unhappy with the permanent changes post-pandemic, or vice versa?
My second hand knowledge is mostly from elementary school teachers in the southeast US. I’d love to hear from teachers across all age groups, especially outside the US.
My aunt has been teaching 3rd grade in the US (8-9 year olds) for over 20 years. She says there's a noticeable impact on the students, they're all behind socially and academically. When the pandemic hit her school district switched to online classes via zoom. This was a new experience for the teachers and students, getting kids to pay attention to a video call was difficult. As a result, homework and classwork mostly went unfinished but the policy was no failing. The next year the students returned to school, her 3rd grade students had spent their entire 2nd grade year online. Their social skills hadn't developed past 1st grade. They spent most of the year going over the 2nd grade curriculum. In the year following, the kids were still behind.
There's an entire generation of students have a year missing from their education and our institutions pretend like everything is normal. I think that relative to the rest of the population the number of students who missed a year is small, and the severity of the impact probably drops off with older students. I wonder if any of this will matter when these students graduate and enter the workforce.
The couple living next door to me are both high school teachers, and they've told me basically exactly the same thing. Most of the kids are a year behind, but no one failed, not even the worst students. Students have generally taken a step back as far as behavior in and out of the classroom, and classrooms are much harder to control than before. My neighbors seem pretty stressed out by it all.
Wow. I understand some additional slack probably needed to be offered, but no failing whatsoever seems extreme. I can also understand the challenge with kids this young though.
A school I was in pushed me to skip a year of math. I believe I went straight from general arithmetic to algebra 1 (when there's normally a pre-algebra course in between).
I struggled significantly. I went from being a student who was excited about future career opportunities due to my interest in math and science, to feeling like a failure because I hit a wall with this math I couldn't understand. I still have anxiety about math to this very day.
I couldn't imagine feeling this way about all of my courses. I feel like there has to be some kind of middle ground. Maybe summer courses to get kids who are struggling back on track? (Summer school has been a thing for a long time, right?)
Between this and all of the "iPad kids" growing up into young adults, I think our society is going to feel some major bumps in the road as we progress further.
I believe the school would work with the parents in cases where the kid was struggling to get them back on track through 1 on 1 instruction during lunch or recess, or after school tutoring. It's not perfect but it's far better than doing nothing. Not every kid can get this instruction and not every school has the resources to provide the extra assistance. I assume there are underfunded schools that can't afford to provide anything like that.
I fear that this is a common feeling among students in this affected generation, but won't be obvious on the surface and will manifest once they reach higher levels of education or enter the workforce.
I wrote out an answer but didn’t submit it, and then I wrote another one but didn’t submit it either. Neither one felt really sufficient on its own, but I couldn’t really merge the two, so I'm just putting them here as two separate responses.
Response One
Take everything that was already challenging about the job and add 1 to it. That’s what COVID did.
I can’t really pinpoint one specific impact it had (and it’s hard to disentangle that from other concurrent factors anyway), only that the post-COVID years were a welcome return to normal but also that normal was harder than it was before.
Honestly though? Even that’s hard to put on COVID specifically. It’s been the pattern of my entire career that this job is getting more difficult with time, when it should be getting easier. That started well before COVID.
I also question whether a lot of what we're concerned about is really just recency bias. I started teaching a good while ago now, and during my first year I assumed a lot of the issues I was facing were current, modern problems of the time. I then read Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase which was published in 1965. Granted, it’s fiction so it’s not exactly valid rigorous data, but even so, I was surprised at how well it captured a lot of the issues I was experiencing firsthand — decades later. It opened my eyes to the idea that many of the issues in education are long-standing rather than freshly formed ones.
This doesn’t mean COVID didn’t have an impact, but I think COVID tends to draw our eye and make us think it had outsize unique consequences. Instead, if I had to guess, I think its biggest impact was in accelerating or exacerbating a lot of already longstanding issues. For example: we were already concerned about students’ screentime and social media use before COVID, then they spent a year effectively glued to Chromebooks and TikTok.
I understand this is kind of a frustrating cop-out answer, and I honestly wish I could write more to do justice to what I’ve said here, but it’s only the beginning of the school year and I’m already exhausted. All those +1s are weighing on me.
Response Two
There’s a sort of heightened baseline for coldness, meanness — even casual cruelty.
This is true for students, but it’s really true for parents. I don’t know if it’s a result of COVID heightening adult stress and effectively being its own sort of trauma, or whether it’s a product of the Twitterification of society where conflict and hostility are valued over kindness and courtesy. Maybe it’s something else entirely.
All I know is that parents are much more likely to be combative, aggressive, and demanding. If we have to notify them of something negative, like their student not completing assignments or misbehaving, there’s often a retaliatory quality to the response. A lot of parents immediately enter what I call “car crash mode” which is when they admit no fault and instead try to put the blame on the other driver (that is, us). A simple courtesy email (e.g. “your student didn’t turn in an important project”) can and does blow up in our faces pretty regularly.
There’s also a greater lack of appreciation for the fact that we work with, by the very nature of our jobs, a large number of students. Some parents will monopolize our time and energy as if their child is the only child see on a daily basis. Their expectations for our performance are completely unrealistic, so then they naturally get mad and feel slighted when we don’t meet their unfair standards. Meanwhile, it would be literally impossible to devote that much of our efforts to even 10 of our students, much less all 100.
Again, this isn't necessarily COVID-specific. Before COVID, we were already concerned about lawnmower parents replacing helicopter parents (that article is from 2018). Similar to what I said above though, I think COVID exacerbated this issue.
Every few years I seem to have a crisis of conscience about staying in this career. I've wanted to leave so many times, but then I always end up staying. Part of that is because there are parts of teaching that I genuinely do love, and working with kids can be joyful and fulfilling. The other part of that is that I've effectively aged out and skilled out of any other options. I’m locked in to this whether I like it or not.
Also I love summers.
I cannot stress that enough. Summers cover a lot of sins.
If, in some strange twist of fate, I do end up leaving though, I can pretty much guarantee it’ll be because of adults, not kids. I have patience for children and their misbehavior. It’s part of their development. They’re still learning.
Adults though, should know better. I have much less patience there, but I also can’t really do anything other than just politely abide it. There’s a huge and frustrating imbalance here. I’m professionally bound to standards for my behavior and can lose my career and license should I cross any politeness boundaries. Meanwhile, parents can say whatever horrible things they want to or about us, and we still have to keep teaching their child as best we can.
Up the Down Staircase is one of my favorite books and I am not a teacher. In some ways it is a kinder gentler funnier Catch 22. It really shows how leadership can be terrible to deal with when working for an institution. I'm sure it shows a lot that is specific to education but I can also relate to the struggle.
I hope it gets better for you.
My relative was asked to start an online school just before the school year started in the middle of covid. With a herculean effort he managed to get it up and running in less than 2 weeks and refine it over the school year.
He said that engagement was extremely varied - from kids who eagerly did online assignments as soon as they got up in the morning, and completing them early in the day, sometimes with parental engagement, to some kids who disappeared off the radar for the entire school year. When they did zoom classes there were the kids who wanted to answer every question (just like in the classroom) and those who said they were too 'shy' to even turn on their camera (but were likely playing video games on another monitor lol)
The school division had no easy way to track down the AWOL kids and they missed an entire year because their parents didnt care and weren't at all interested in their education. Obviously those kids were WAY behind for the next school year.
As someone who knows children in bad homes, I would caution against easy levity about issues like these.
Approaching it with an appreciation of possible struggles rather than just "gaming lol" can help a lot for those that hear (or read) such dismissive societal reasoning.
The kid that may or may not be gaming can also be the one with a drunkard parent that is walking around in their underwear and not giving a fuck, could be a parent that looks perfect on the outside but gives no shits about their kid or their home, could be a child with a parent that is struggling to get by and has a home that shows the effort is focused on what the outside world sees, can be a child that doesn't have parents there to help them stay on track for whatever reason.
Not saying gaming in the background hasn't happened. I am very sure it has. Adults going online with millions of videos of taking important work calls from bed in their PJ's make it very clear that all ages did these things.
But reading such comments hits home for those of us that know of, or even were/is still in situations where it is really, really not just "gaming lol" that was the reason for being careful with showing up on camera or unmuting.
Both hearing and seeing such dismissive comments and attitudes just reinforce a kind of need to "joke it away" instead of being honest where appropriate. And reinforces what so many of these kids already know all too well: The world doesn't give a shit and doesn't want to hear about it.
In cases such as these, it is better to just leave it as an observation that kids often left their cameras and/or mic's off. The added "gaming probz lol" isn't really needed. Because even in the cases where that is true, there is often more going on.
Very few children want to be stupid and not learn. Kids are natural explorers. Not saying all kids are angels just waiting for someone to impart their knowledge onto, but...
I don't know, it just hits home for me as I know children that were shouted at to the point of spittle hitting their face, fists punching furniture mere millimetres away from their hands holding little pencils trying their best to make sense of difficult things, just because their parents are that kind of person. One of them were treated like this when trying to learn their ABC's in first grade, having only had half a school year before not even having the solace of going to school anymore.
They are still struggling to achieve even a 50% school attendance to this day, even after finally getting away from the abusive parent. Their entire attitude to school and learning (even if their healthy parent talks to them about something they wanted to know!) has become one huge trauma trigger.
It is rarely as simple as "kidz don't care lol"
Got out of the business—covid & lockdown accelerated a lot of changes societally, probably all but remote work being pretty big negs. Maybe it's gotten better since I left but at least through a couple years ago it was hard to get kids excited about anything.
How long were you teaching before covid? Do you mean the pandemic accelerated an already-present issue with attentiveness of kids, or the separation via computer screen was the problem?
Ten years! I don't think it was limited to lockdown/quarantine/online classes; kids had been handed chromebooks/ipads for years before 2020 and it could be for some things or all their things in class (I was big on paper & pencil), but when we watched a movie or did The Cool Project it got the people going, without fail. I think maybe it was desensitization? The rise of 24/7 social media during quarantine prob didn't help, and that was prob a factor in the decline in teenage mental health (and everyone else mental health), but literally i think there's going to be a cohort of a few years where those guys just are not into it, for the rest of their lives maybe. Like I said I don't know how it is now because I didn't stick around, I hope it's better.
I've been a secondary school teacher for 10 years. The names for the grades here are different, but my students are about 16 years old. I agree with the other comments, it definitely got worse after the pandemic.
I have always avoided working with 15 year olds because their hormones are at a peak and they tend to be much meaner to each other. My experience was that from 16 on they got much better at being civilized. But since the pandemic it's exactly like that one year of social development is missing. The academic aspect is also behind, but I think the social aspect is more notable in my case.
I wish I knew how my pandemic students are doing now at university. I imagine they might be struggling even more than normal, which would be a failure of the system.
On the other hand, I also teach teenagers and adults at a language institute and that experience had much better results. We were surprised to see that the exam results were similar to other years and they haven't got worse since, so I guess the context changed a lot.
Personally, the start of the pandemic was a really dark time for me. We miss only one day of classes, they told us that we needed to start teaching online immediately. Which was a major struggle for me because I'm not too technologically savvy and I'm not sure I even had my own computer. We had to manage with what we had at home and my husband is a teacher too, so we would have to teach at the same time. Thank God for him who became my IT guy, and thank God we didn't have children. I'm not sure I would have coped otherwise. I bearly did, I remember holding until the class had finished to start crying.
After I had the materials and I got used to the program I felt much better, and at some point I ended up enjoying working in my Crocs, but it took a few months.