The stress of online teaching | Teachers tell their story

Teaching has been a difficult yet rewarding journey for the senior teacher and grade supervisor. She believes, however, that the last 15 months have become even more stressful -- a view shared by other educators who spoke to Old Harbour News.

Since the emergence of the global coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 teaching is done online, which is the case for almost every other profession. Online teaching, however, has its unique challenges as teachers are spending inordinately long hours in front of their computer screen, with their mental and physical well-being being negatively impacted.

“I was having some circulation problems in my feet because of sitting down for too long. Even some days I realize that I didn’t go outside to get any sunlight and I said, ‘No, that can’t happen’,” the Marlie Mount Primary teacher told Old Harbour News, pointing to increased headaches, poor diet and not eating on time as other noticeable factors she experiences on account of online teaching.

As a supervisor, Ashmeade’s role carries greater responsibilities. She manages five other teachers and is required to attend virtual workshops on weekdays and seminars put on by the Ministry of Education which are sometimes scheduled on weekends, and which can last up to four hours. Additionally, the writing of daily lesson plans can easily take upwards of two hours.

Added to her level of stress is that the mother of a 12-year-old son and a daughter, age six, doesn’t possess the financial capital to hire a domestic helper.

She’s left with no other option, therefore, but to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously, which is affecting how she balances her life. “I remember one evening my husband came in from work and he said to me, ‘I leave you on the computer this morning and I come back in the night, and you are still on the computer’. I was smiling and telling him it’s my job and he was really angry,” said Ashmeade.

“A lot of persons might believe that being at home you’d get time to wash, you’d get time to clean, but because of being online for almost the entire day, I have more housework to do. You are so burnt out… the earliest I will go to bed is 10:30 in the night,” she lamented.

Unreliable internet access, insufficient electronic devices among students, and poor parenting supervision in the homes of children are among the primary reasons a teacher’s work is virtually never finish.

Rarely is a teacher is able to conduct a class with the full cohort of students under the circumstances highlighted. On the flipside, the level of indiscipline among students, normally associated with face-to-face, is almost non-existent. 

Though her years of raising children are behind her, Sylvia Brissett said the strain of online teaching is still quite burdensome. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic Brissett was on leave. She only returned in January but says she’s already suffering from the effects of spending excessive screen time teaching, attending workshops, seminars and writing lesson plans. 

“Most times when classes finish I am still on the computer preparing work for the following day, marking papers… dealing with parents… so it’s more stressful,” said Brissett, a veteran educator of 34 years and an Old Harbour resident.

“We start at 8:30 am and sometimes all 12 o’clock in the night I am just coming off my computer. It is more stressful for me… and it’s taking a toll on me,” she shared.

She told Old Harbour News that she has been going to the doctor for the recurring issue of pain and swelling in her hands, which her doctor said “is due to the constant sitting down”.

“Sometimes you finish class for the day, but you have a 2:30 workshop, and sometimes come 4:30, five o’clock that workshop is not over,” added Ashmeade.

“It’s 24/7!” Spring Garden Primary teacher Pauline Humes exclaimed. “It’s like you don’t have no time for yourself. Parents call you any time and they expect you to respond to them any time.”
The high level of misunderstanding among some parents also compound matters for teachers, they say.

“So instead of sending a text in WhatsApp you have to send them a voice note or call them and explain,” said Humes, who added that “face-to-face is totally different; when the day done, it’s done… But with online all four days after, they are posting work that should have been submitted from last week.”

Can online teaching work?

Aside from having reliable internet access and proper devices, there are other positives to online teaching, nonetheless. For example, teachers are better equipped to manage disruptive students, while teaching aid charts can be reused indefinitely without any associated costs. Writing lesson plans should become easier in due course, as templates and other data developed are stored digitally and can be extrapolated for future use.

“Even at our school, we were thinking that next year if we do face-to-face we can still use it (computers) in classroom to assist the teaching… some of those slides, the games that we found out we can use instead of sitting down and making all of these things with our hands, the technology is there to use,” said Brissett, who teaches at Spanish Town Primary.

Team teaching, an emerging trend designed to help teachers cope with online teaching, is also being adopted by educators, Old Harbour News was informed. This is a strategy where two teachers combined their classes online and share the workload.

But while there is scope for more virtual learning, subjects like mathematics are best taught face-to-face, Ashmeade reasoned.

“I am a teacher of math and certain math topics the children… don’t do so well. Math is something you have to manipulate; have to be hands on. There might be some online instructional aids but sometimes it is not enough to let the children grasp the concept. Not everybody will understand by just watching a video,” she said while calling for a reduction in the number of subjects primary educators are mandated to cover in a day.

No less than four subjects are taught each day at the primary level.

“Just lessen the subjects, because as I said before, for all those subjects you have to make a new lesson plan each day for that subject,” said Ashmeade.

“We need more teachers,” argued Brissett, reiterating a long-held position of their professional union, the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA). “One person for the entire day is too much. There are so many things you have to be doing.”

It is unclear if officials in the education sector have conducted any study on the impacts of online teaching since the outbreak of the coronavirus. If such a study was done it is yet to be made public.

For Humes, online teaching isn’t the way to go for Jamaica given the myriad of challenges in the education sector and the country in general.
“The only way it can work is unless government gives them (students) free Wi-Fi, plus have somebody to monitor them,” she said.

The government has proposed extending the school year into the summer due to time lost for thousands of students due to the ongoing pandemic. But the powerful teachers’ union has rejected the proposal outright, with its president, Jasford Gabriel, highlighting the mental, emotional, physical, and psycho-social impact that online teaching is having on its members.
“I am really dying for the last day of school. Honestly, I am burnt out and when I am burnt out, I don’t function well,” Ashmeade told Old Harbour News in a depressed tone.

“I have adapted to the new norm, but it is still difficult. Sometimes we have three workshops for the week. These workshops are not like an hour long, they are sometimes two, three hours… so you realize that your brain just cannot contain any more of the Zoom, Google Meet, you just can’t contain anymore sitting around a computer just listening to persons because that’s what you have been doing from morning until night.”