Maria Marta
A secondary school teacher of English as a Foreign Language, Argentina
26 May 2020
Before the lockdown
I have been teaching for more than 30 years. I am a teacher of English in a secondary school in Flores, Buenos Aires. The school where I work is only a 10-minute walk from my house, and is organised into three shifts, morning, afternoon, and evening. Monday to Friday, I work on the morning shift, and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I also work on the afternoon shift. Those three days I used to have lunch at the school. My students are teenagers between 13 and 18 years old. I teach 10 groups of about 28 students, 3 to 4 hours a week. Some of them live in the same area, some of them come by train for 15-20 kms. Most of my students are immigrants from Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay that have been in Argentina for some time, or not so long. We also have local students from villas, shanty towns, that live in precariously built houses in very small space, where there are little alleyways for bikes and motorbikes, but not wide enough for cars. We also have students from other provinces in Argentina that live in this area because they can’t afford rent anywhere else. We rarely have students without socioeconomic issues. Some of these students go back to their home countries for a while, and then come back, so they have rather interrupted educational trajectories. Nonetheless, they all together have rich cultural backgrounds, so they can tell stories about their home countries and their traditions. In the English class, they don’t speak much.
How life has changed because of Covid-19
We started the academic year on March 9th and we went into lockdown on March 20th. Not all the students had registered by then, so I haven’t met all my students, and some of the new students didn’t manage to meet their teachers. We asked the students to upload their pictures on the school platform, and so did we teachers. I’m sure some of them can’t distinguish between their English and their geography teachers.
Since the lockdown, my daily routine changed. I used to get up at 6.20 and I can now get up at 8 or 9 but then I have to catch up with work. We don’t have synchronous work, so it depends on you to organise. For example, today I will work on the school platform, giving students feedback until a certain time. Then, I have lunch, sometimes I cook, or sometimes my husband does, as he’s also working from home.
The Ministry of Education has asked us to do follow-up students, but not to assess them. Not all the students have got a laptop or a desktop computer. Sometimes they only have one or two mobile phones for a family of four, five, or six people. The same mobile phone is also used to receive calls from the school about food support and the government’s emergency income. Not all children knew how to use a computer or their mobile phones. They are very good at Minecraft and social media but not at anything else.
The school prefects have contacted children and have found out about those with no internet access at home, or those who use internet top-up cards. Some of them used to go to health centres or near schools to get Wi-Fi, but that isn’t possible anymore. The most valuable thing for those students is their school folder where they have all their materials, and the school library. Now, even if materials were digitalised, they wouldn’t be able to access them. The government offered some printed materials for those students without internet access, but our headmaster said that we didn’t have any funds to print, or to distribute them to each family, when we haven’t even managed to contact all the students.
También porque me llevo un montón de tiempo, pero no dejo de hacerlo, mandarles feedback en el cuadrito donde se puede escribir texto y se los escribo en español, porque me parece que el lenguaje del afecto es el español para mi. I take a long time to give feedback, but I still do it in a little square where you can write some text, and I write it in Spanish, because the language of love is Spanish for me.
After a lot of fuss, some students managed to get access to the school platform, but not all of them. So we have used the school blog where we upload their tasks, and they send them back via e-mail. The school platform isn’t very versatile, so we have to do the follow-up manually. I created a chart in Word with the students’ names and their homework, where I also include their feedback. So within the same handout, we include support material as we can so they can work on their own. I take a long time to give feedback, but I still do it in a little square where you can write some text, and I write it in Spanish, because the language of love is Spanish for me.
What I’m worried about
I wonder how children are doing their work. When they’re in front of their work, or a text, or a grammar problem, how do you explain it to them? The other day I decided to send them a 10-minute video, instead of me doing that. It was from a Mexican teacher that explained personal pronouns and possessive adjectives in various different ways, so I thought it could help them. Then I thought ‘it’s too long, they’ll hate me!’. Then the students sent me their tasks back. To those who had made mistakes, I asked them to watch the whole video and try again. I knew they hadn’t watched it all. I worry about how they are or are not learning what we normally teach them in the classroom.
I also worry about when we go back to classes, as a personal challenge: how are we going to concentrate all the content we gave online? How will (or won’t) it have impacted each student? Or didn’t on those children that couldn’t get involved? So what is a normal school day going to be like? How long will it take us? Will students remember classroom rules when we get back? We didn’t even manage to reinforce them in March.
Los alumnos que viven en condiciones de hacinamiento, que tienen situaciones de abuso, y que lo mejor que les pasa es ir a la escuela. Los que tienen situación de abuso intrafamiliar, por ejemplo ¿Cómo lo están pasando? ¿Qué sabemos de esos alumnos? Students who live in overcrowded conditions, who have situations of abuse, and the best thing that happens to them is going to school. Those who have a situation of domestic abuse, for example, how are they experiencing the lockdown? What do we know about those students?
The state school in Argentina plays a great social work role which is very important. Students who live in overcrowded conditions, who have situations of abuse, and the best thing that happens to them is going to school. Those who have a situation of domestic abuse, for example, how are they experiencing the lockdown? What do we know about those students? Those children usually feel safe at school and sometimes they speak up. Some parents have complained because they now have to be and support their own children, and I think, well, yes…Sometimes they don’t know what happens to their children and now they are with their children every day.
Emerging opportunities
I think children have learned other skills. Maybe they learned to attach a file in an e-mail. I wonder how they managed to do that. I’d like to ask them: How did you manage to upload the English homework? Did your mom help you? Did you have to do that on your own? Did you watch a tutorial?
In terms of training, the school hasn’t given us much support, but more expert teachers have provided training to those less expert. That has been good. We’ve had to learn to use the school platform and upload the materials. The teachers created WhatsApp groups where we can ask each other questions about using the platform by sending screenshots and the like. We have used digital tools in a different way.
Future fears and hopes
My main motivation at the minute is to go back to the classroom. I'm not the same teacher working from home as I am in the classroom. My motivation is down. But it gives me some hope to go back to the classroom sometime this year or next year. Our school is based on the face-to-face contact.
I wonder what will happen when we go back. There are rumours that we may go back to the classroom in September, October, November, and half December. What will happen to the December assessment? Can students be promoted? This won’t depend on us exclusively, but on the Ministry of Education. What will the assessment and promotion criteria be? They may have learned other things that are not precisely content-related. What will happen next year? Where are going we going to start from?
I’m sure that going back to school will be like an explosion of happiness for a lot of children, and I hope that adds something positive that will lift their spirits and that we can learn. This also goes for us, adults, meeting in the staff room, and we are missing that space.
This is a historical year, and the following years as well. I don’t know if we will have to maintain social distancing and, children that haven’t seen each other for a while, they will want to hug each other, and they won’t be allowed to do so. We Argentinians like human contact.
Espero que eso, sume a lo positivo para que ellos puedan estar en un mejor estado de ánimo y que podamos aprender. I hope that adds something positive that will lift their spirits and that we can learn.