Teaching complex sentences got a little more complex during the last two months of the school year.
For Indianola Academy English teachers Carrie Hodges, Ruth Carmen Poindexter and Dana Lipsey, finishing out the last several weeks following spring break came with both challenges and rewards.
“I found it extremely stressful, much more than I anticipated,” Hodges said honestly during a recent interview with The E-T.
Stress doesn’t necessarily mean that distance teaching was an altogether unpleasant experience for the instructors, but these were teachers who cared about the outcomes at the end of the school year.
Hodges has been teaching at IA for 36 years.
She taught Lipsey when she was in high school and her kids after that, and she, like the others, places a high value on the interaction between the teacher and students in the classroom.
Nevertheless, the trio adapted quickly.
“I learned so much,” Poindexter, who teaches 10-12 grade classes, said. “I will use the skills I learned in my classes the next school year.”
Hodges and Poindexter, who teach multiple classes and multiple grade levels, taught by way of the Zoom app each week.
Lipsey, who has 23 honors level seniors, recorded videos and posted them to YouTube.
“For me, it was a lot easier than for someone who had four classes,” Lipsey said.
Lipsey kept up with her students through a group text, letting them know when videos were posted and when they would be receiving emails with assignments.
Hodges, who set up an office in her home, utilized Zoom a lot more.
She would teach as many as 20 kids at a time live on the app, while others would watch the recorded version later.
For juniors and seniors, the final nine-week period of the school year means that it is time for term papers.
Lipsey and Hodges’s students were already pretty far along in that process when school dismissed for spring break, but it did not make the process any easier.
“They were almost through, but not quite, and it’s a lot harder to turn kids loose to do online research when they’ve never done it and you’re not there,” Hodges said.
Lipsey said that during the time when students were still dropping off and picking up work at the school, she was able to get her students’ papers.
“I actually came up here with a mask on and held out a milk crate,” Lipsey said. “I left the whole milk crate out in the sunshine for a couple of days and then graded them.”
The grading process was the difficult part.
“That was tedious. Everything took longer,” Hodges said. “What would have taken two seconds for me to say ‘Here, you need to do this,” then I have to mark it, grade it, take a picture of it and email it. We couldn’t have done it without the technology, but it did make it a lot more tedious.”
Once the school stopped the dropoff and pickup routine, the teachers were only able to communicate with their students by way of technology.
“I missed my students a lot, so I was glad to touch base each week,” Poindexter said. “I hope they learned to be responsible for completing assignments on their own, just as they will in a college setting.”
Each of the teachers said they got a renewed appreciation for being able to teach students in-person.
“I realized how much I enjoyed my job and my students,” Poindexter said. “And how much I love our school and how important it is in all of our lives.”
