Cindy Baird has always wanted to appear on the silver screen.
That dream didn’t exactly come true this spring, but the “blue screen” was close enough for the 11th and 12th grade Indianola Academy history teacher.
Baird was one of many teachers at IA who had to adjust quickly back in March to teaching from a distance through apps like Zoom.
While admittedly not tech savvy, Baird began to embrace the technology the more she learned about it from Headmaster Charlie Mason and High School Principal Clete Putnam.
“The more Mr. Putnam and Mr. Mason talked about it, the more excited I got, because this is my dream to be on the silver screen,” Baird said. “I always, always, always wanted to be on the silver screen, so I thought, ‘I’ll take the blue.’ I thought getting on the blue screen would be the next best thing, so I was thrilled.”
When school let out for spring break, Baird had just completed lessons on the European theater during World War II, and she had to teach the Pacific theater through Zoom.
For Baird, the entire experience of teaching through Zoom was done so through a glass-half-full perspective.
“I got to cover so much more, because I usually spend the whole fourth quarter on World War II and the Holocaust,” she said. “But this way, I got to cover things after the war like the United Nations, the Korean conflict, and I got to do the Vietnam War.”
Baird said she would have 25-30 students on at any given time during live lectures, and she learned a lot about her students through those meetings.
“I knew what they ate for breakfast,” Baird said. “I saw more kitty cats and puppy dogs. One of them even had a little goat they were caring for.”
One day during a lecture, two of her students were fishing and joined the 10 a.m. class from a boat.
The lesson was going smoothly until one of the fishermen got a bite.
“He said, ‘Mrs. B., could you stop the lecture while we reel in the fish?’” she said.
Baird said she also learned to incorporate videos from the internet into her courses each day.
She would send links to YouTube videos that would reinforce her lectures.
“I should have been doing that stuff all year,” she said. “I am going to do it this upcoming year.”
Baird said that she typically uses the TV in her classroom to show two movies a year, but now she will be showing more videos from the web that will help her students understand the lesson better.
“I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been Zooming, and I’ve been teaching for 26 years,” she said.
Perhaps her favorite part of teaching history during the COVID-19 pandemic was assigning her students to record history as it happened.
Each student had to write in a journal Monday through Saturday of each week from late March until mid-May.
“One of my things I always say is history is what’s happening,” Baird said.
Baird now has stacks of journals from students who lived through the events of the past three months.
“Sometimes they did exciting things,” Baird said of the journal entries. “Sometimes it was about day-to-day things…They are like all of us. They go through days just like us.”
Baird said she is looking forward to getting back into the classroom with her students, in-person, but she plans to carry over all the skills she learned from the experience this past semester.
“I prefer hands on, real live students, but I loved being on the blue screen,” Baird said. “I loved it. I thought the students and the parents did an outstanding job throughout all of this.”
