A Letter to Teachers
Alexa David-Lang, ‘22
May 2020
Dear Teachers,
Right off the bat, thank you for taking the time to read this letter, I know that you have a lot on your plate. But since I have your attention, I’d like to take some time to talk about online classes and some of the things that you guys have been doing. Now I know that we are all trying to adapt to these new circumstances, but I just have a couple of things to note. I don’t mean to be generalizing teachers as a whole, but I think that it would benefit everyone to listen to constructive feedback.
Firstly, the work situation. Just...why? It completely makes sense that you would assign some extra things because we are meeting fewer times a week, but that is completely different than what has been happening. Most of my teachers have been saying that they are completely empathetic about what’s going on right now and they want to be sure that we’re not working too hard, and then turning around and assigning an unreasonable amount of work. I would honestly prefer it if you guys were upfront with us about what you are doing, whether it’s a lot of work or a little. Of course, no one likes getting a lot of work, but no one likes people who say that they’re worried about them and then does the exact thing that they say they are trying to avoid. In times like these, we want to know what’s going on. Everything is so up in the air and it would be nice to have some clarity. Even explaining that we are meeting less and you are worried about us falling behind would be better than listening to you saying that you are being understanding. Or, even better, saying that you are going to be understanding, then being understanding. Listening to your students and making changes would make us incredibly grateful.
Secondly, our time. Despite the fact that we are all quarantined right now and have a lot of time on our hands, our time is still valuable. I have heard so much from my friends about teachers who are letting their classes go on way longer than they should. Just think about the situation that we’re in. Say we have your class first period which ends at 9:45 and another class right after at 9:50. Five minutes is more than enough time to go from one class to another right now because we don’t physically have to move. But if you let your class go over by even two or three minutes, that cuts into our passing time and possibly even into the time of our next class. Someone might want to arrive at their next class two or three minutes early which means that they would have to straight from one class to the next with no break. Someone also might be having technical issues, especially with the switches between Google Meets and Zoom with our DOE emails, and it might take longer to get to their class than they expected. And the most important part of all, we just need some air. Getting up to stretch or to get a snack from the kitchen could be the difference between someone who falls asleep in their class and someone who actively participates in their class. We all want online classes to be as close to normal school as possible, and having a break, even for a couple of minutes, will help all of us maintain our sanity.
And lastly, emails. We all get them, we all have too many of them, and we all have to deal with them. I’m not going to say too much in this section because I know that teachers get a crazy amount of emails every day, but it’s still worth mentioning. After checking the settings on my phone, I saw that I have gotten a combined 138 notifications from my email and Google Classroom this last week (not including the weekend). Yes, I am including Google Classroom in there because any time a teacher posts to it, I get a notification from my email and from Google Classroom. And then another notification from both platforms the day before the assignment is due. I get that email is the main way that you guys communicate with us now and is really important, but some of these are a little unnecessary. For example, this week from one of my teachers (who shall remain anonymous) I received three separate emails reminding us of their office hours, which haven’t changed since online school started, and two emails saying that we were going back to Zoom, but they said literally the exact same thing. All I’m saying is if you have something important for your students to know or work to assign, by all means, send an email. But it would make such a big difference if you cut down on some of the redundant ones.
I am sure that teachers have to deal with all of these problems and many more, but I was just hoping that they would be open to suggestions. Many teachers and faculty members at Bard have been very open to new ideas and changes that they could make to help us, which I really appreciate. But I’m sure that if they made these changes, people would complain a lot less and it would definitely help us all get through this difficult time. We just all need to be kind and flexible to each other and things can run a lot smoother.
Sincerely,
Alexa David-Lang
P.S. I apologize on behalf of the countless students who go on their phones during your online classes. I wish I could say that it will stop, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere.