The third essay in the COVID-19: The Bigger Picture series in partnership with Thomson Reuters Foundation, the essay and photos documents the impact of working people in the midst of the pandemic.
The impossible task of being a teacher and a parent during a pandemic is enough to break a person, and on the Sunday before the first day of school in Durham, North Carolina, it almost did.
Sitting at the white kitchen table in her split-level home in a verdant, hilly neighborhood, seventh-grade English teacher Anca Stefan’s eyes welled up with tears as she thought about the days ahead.
She spent the last two weeks scrambling to learn how to use Zoom videoconferencing, getting up to speed on the state’s online learning platform and figuring out how to translate her in-person lessons for a virtual classroom.
But she has wondered if academic rigor was really what kids need at a time when many of their lives were turned upside down.
To do her job, Stefan has turned her kitchen into her classroom and the table into her desk, against the backdrop of a sink stacked with dishes and a refrigerator covered with family photos.
Down the hall is a bedroom filled with stuffed animals, and home to a pet gerbil named Giblet, that will be the classroom for Stefan’s bubbly 8-year-old daughter Eliza, who goes by Ellie.
The bedroom, which will be used for remote learning at least for the first nine weeks of the school year, has been readied with a squat wooden table for a desk, a black Google Chromebook and a cup full of colored markers.
While some parents might be able to help their children find their way through this new and unusual school year, Stefan will be busy with her 110 students.
Read the rest of the essay here.
