What does a day in the life of remote teaching really look like? ASCD asked a handful of educators to film their experiences during quarantine over the last few months, as they navigated remote lessons, dealt with feelings of stress, frustration, and heartache, parented children, exercised, and figured out to how connect with students in a new reality. They share an intimate portrait of day-to-day life: what they heard from students, the tools/resources they found helpful in their work, what made them worry or caused them to struggle, what made them laugh or helped them focus or gave them hope.
“It’s important to have a healthy anger that this time is a hard one,” said Geneviève DeBose in her video, paraphrasing lessons from a talk with Paul Chavez of the Cesar Chavez Foundation. “No matter how hard this work is right now and how many inequities are being pushed up to the surface for everyone to see and impacting my students in really profound ways, we don’t give up.”
Geneviève DeBose, literary coach at Edwin Markham Middle School, Los Angeles
Calvin Nellum, STEM and physics teacher and a 9th Grade lead at Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, Detroit, Mich.
Amy Ballard, high school math teacher and part-time instructional coach at Brashier Middle College Charter High School, Simpsonville, S.C.
Shannon Szymczak, 7th grade ELA teacher and AVID coordinator, Tacoma Public Schools, Tacoma, Wash.
Michelle Haseltine, 7th grade at Brambleton Middle School, Loudoun County, Va.
Stay tuned for more video diaries and observations in the coming months. Want to submit your own “Day in the Life” video? Reach out to ASCD’s Digital team.
