I learned a lot, but I'm exhausted

 Jose Moran - Teacher and researcher of innovative educational projects

This testimony summarizes my experience in this long period of confinement and that of many professors and managers with whom I have been talking for nearly two years.

This long period of pandemic has exhausted me. It was all so unexpected, surreal, so long and tense, that I'm only now realizing and feeling, more clearly, all its effects. In the beginning came the shock of confinement, with the swarming of countless lives to exchange ideas, experiences and find outlets for school and life online.

I discovered new platforms, I had to redesign classes with more videos, asynchronous and synchronous activities. Everything was too new and challenging to serve students with good digital resources and those with very poor access. I did my best to balance my professional life at home, with family routines and the anguish of being closed for a long time, with many uncertainties in terms of health, finances and the future.

Many months online created a new routine in managing live class times, following up on forums, discussion groups, events, demands of many students, teachers, managers and parents, in increasingly longer journeys. Everything stopped being new and became a habit. A tense routine, with the challenge of the whole day attracting the attention of students, planning different strategies and checking if they were really participating, with cameras often turned off. A new challenge was to interact remotely with parents: some participating a lot; others, throbbing and/or complaining. It was also exhausting to manage students who did not post activities, either because of access problems or lack of interest. Greater frustration came with the loss of students who dropped out or disappeared.

I learned a lot, worked a lot, got tired a lot, and now I feel more clearly the consequences of this long period of confinement: an accumulated stress that expresses itself in more frequent irritation. There are other aggravating factors: the loss of loved ones and seeing others, depressed or unemployed, in a deteriorating economic and political scenario.

I learned a lot from the pandemic: I had a lot of help from colleagues, I did projects in partnership with some of them. We are going back to face-to-face, but everything is still not smooth. There are still students who stay at home, even though most have gone back to school; it takes extra dedication to keep each and every student engaged. I made a lot of progress in digital skills: I master several platforms, I can organize group activities online, I shoot videos, I became familiar with creation, communication and assessment applications. This will help me a lot from now on because I will be able to diversify both in the classroom and in synchronous and asynchronous digital environments.

I do my best, but sometimes it seems insufficient. I feel more often the fatigue of many months lived in half, with the brakes pulled, saturated with lives, and insecure in the face of a slow recovery, which requires a lot of resilience and reinvention capacity, after such a long, different and exhausting period. In the midst of so many contradictions, the result seems to me to be very favorable. I try to live each day in the most coherent way, evolving at my possible pace and always keeping the hope of being ready for new challenges.

 

Published on my blog Educação Transformadora: https://moran10.blogspot.com/2021/11/i-learned-lot-but-im-exhausted.html