Today, my students managed to drain all my energy. I thought the day would go smoothly because we had just come back from a four day holiday, but I was entirely wrong. Firstly, the internet was abnormally slow and the connection was going up and down. My first group is online, with only one student face-to-face and she was especially chatty, wanting all my attention to her and forgetting her colleagues were online patiently waiting for my connection to work better.

In my second class, there is a boy who drives me insane. I already know him, but today he was testing my patience. He is the kind of child who pretends to be dumb and keeps asking silly questions, but not in a funny way. I would say he is kind of mean and likes to watch me suffer. Because I know what he is doing. He knows I know what he is doing. And there we have an infinite cycle of patience-testing. He wore me off in a way that I began to feel a pain in my arm and I am still feeling it until now. I refuse to die because of a misbehaved child, though.

In this boy's class there was also a student who had to stay online because she was not feeling well. At least that was what her parents had told us. So, besides having to deal with the mean boy, I also had to adapt my already planned lesson (only for face-to-face students) to a hybrid one. In addition, there was the logistics of all the gadgets necessary for a hybrid lesson. And - remember? - the connection was still working very poorly. To my surprise, when I was walking home, I saw the "sick" student walking her dog and looking healthy.

The last face-to-face lesson was also crazy, but normal crazy. My 7 year-old students cannot keep their masks covering their noses and mouth, so I am constantly saying "cover your nose", "put your mask on", "don't stand too close to your friend", "don't touch your friend's mask". And then I had to deal with a student who can't lose. He gets frustrated and doesn't want to play anything anymore. I mean, you would think games were supposed to be fun... go try and bring a simple Baamboozle or a back to the board game to a class of (mostly) spoiled 7-year-olds and your mind would be changed forever.

So, when I got home and I had only 25 minutes to feed my dogs, feed myself (only had time for some peanuts, cookies and coffee today), go to the restroom, before my final online class of the day, I was already exhausted. And I had to explain the past simple and past continuous to a group of insecure intermediate students. I don't understand why so many students reach intermediate level feeling so traumatized, like they aren't good enough. And it translates to their production, which is mostly good for their level. It is so hard for me to motivate this kind of students.

My day finally ended and I was just too tired to do anything else. But, surprise! I still had to prepare tomorrow morning's class and after that I decided to write about this insane day here. Well, insane for me, at least. I'm well aware that there are many teachers who go through worse stuff every day, but, you know, sometimes we just need to vent.

It has been a long time since my last post here and I would like to get back to my blogging activities. Nothing better to get back at it by bringing a day-in-the-life sort of post, which mostly involved me complaining about students and poor internet connection. Maybe - hopefully? - next time I will bring something more useful to share.

* This text was originally posted on my former blog - Today, my students... - on 16th February 2021.

I should have written this post about one year ago when it all started. However, as many of us teachers were, I was extremely busy trying to cope with the new reality. At first, I really thought "quarantine" would mean about 40 days at home, but here we are, eleven months later, still planning online lessons.

Back in March 2020, I was teaching at two schools: a general English course and a bilingual school, which meant two different perspectives. With my course students I had two 1 hour classes a week and with my school students I had five to six classes of 50 minutes a week. Luckily, both schools were using Google Classroom and Meet, so I had to learn how to use only one platform.

This was my context when everybody in Brazil were in "lockdown" and schools were closed for an indefinite period of time. Here, I would like to summarize both experiences because I think they were so different and it would be nice to share and remember them later on.

Teaching online at an English course

The first positive aspect of teaching in this context was having fewer students per classroom. My biggest class had only 12 students. This means that I could hear each one speaking, check pronunciation and do more error correction. I could give enough attention to each of them and better feedback to them and their parents in meetings. When there were still no breakout rooms available in Google Meet, I could create another meet and send them the link, so I still could do some group and pair work.

Another good thing was to have online platforms for all materials I was using. I didn't waste any time scanning books or looking for extra materials. All I had to think of when planning my lessons was how to adapt some of the activities to the new context. This helped me a lot.

I would say a negative thing about teaching at a course was that my lessons had 75 minutes before, and now they only had 60 minutes. So, in addition to all technical issues the student would have every class, I didn't have those 15 minutes and I really wish I did.

Also, there was no time for learner and teacher training. We learned new things as we went through the classes and shared our problems with our fellow teacher whenever we could. Many students were confused about how to use the apps and really how the Google Classroom worked. Some of them couldn't even upload their activities, and some of the young learners didn't have adult's assistance during the lessons.

The first - and perhaps only - positive aspect of teaching online at a regular school was to have more time with the students every week. I would meet them for 5 to 6 lessons of 50 minutes each, so I could do more activities and had more time to solve any technical problems. The syllabus was cut in half, so I had time to do projects, focus on phonics and reading activities.

This also had a downside. I had to find extra materials because I couldn't use the whole book. Also, the material we used in this school had no online resources whatsoever. I mean, zero! In 2020! Can you believe it? Anyway, it was extremely time consuming to find and adapt extra activities every week.

However, the biggest issue for me was how to deal with so many students in class at the same time. There were 25 in one class and 21 in another. Young learners tend to turn on their microphones to say the most random things in the most inconvenient times (during instructions, interrupting their peers, and so on), so this would happen a lot during one lesson.

Overall

The 2020 experience was definitely challenging. Personally, I could find many positive aspects to teaching online. The negative issues, I believe could have been less "traumatizing" if we had had time to do some learner and teacher training in advance. But how could we have foreseen what was coming? In my experience, there was little support from the coordination - it's understandable, as they were dealing with their own problems - and very little training opportunities.

* I did the drawings above - that's why they look so weird. I just took a photo of the drawings and edited a little on the photo editor. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I know I should have created this blog in the beginning of the pandemic, but I couldn't. There was too much going on and it was too much for me (and all of us, really) to process. However, one year after the beginning of the pandemic, I feel it's finally the time to share a few things I have been learning about teaching online, teaching children online, and why I have given up teaching at regular schools.

The only thing I can say for sure is that we will never be the same after going through a pandemic. This has affected all of us in all aspects of life. Here, I will only discuss teaching English. I will also be reposting some series I have written about on my previous blog (Today, my students...) that I will then delete, after I transfer everything from there to this place.

Anyway, I don't have any hopes up for the new blog. I will just start it. I have to begin again.