School away from School

            I started teaching online in 2010 to Korean students. New to the technology of remote teaching I was ushered into a significant teaching and learning experience. Using Skype I facilitated teaching English to my Korean students; share my lessons and activities and video lectures through a learning management system. I made friends, because of that, and was introduced to their culture, learned how to prepare kimchee from a retired lady student. I was not introduced to Kdrama then, though.

            Ten years after, I am teaching online again. Cainta Catholic College, in its quest for excellence and pursue its mission to provide catholic education, made schooling still available for our students. The COVID-19 pandemic truly complicated everyone’s life. It changed the way we live and work. And schools were not spared. My school, CCC, which was plagued by a number of crises in the past, accepted this incredible challenge as a phase of transformation. The administration provided teachers through the assistance of book companies and educational organizations crash courses on online teaching using various Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Software as a Server (SaaS) tools.

            Was it an easy new learning to take for teachers? In my honest opinion, not at all. Not at all.  Or maybe I was not a Tech Savvy teacher completely. Even with my experience as online tutor, and my TPACK and SMAR training from Ateneo, this is still a struggle to me. Teaching is all so demanding and grueling under normal condition; doing it remotely is yet another kind of a ball game for most of us teachers.

            Packages of LMS are served in front of us, teachers. Be it Moodle, Blackboard, Schoology, or Google Classroom, we teachers have to make use of our creativity.  Every day I have to focus on the content vis-à-vis the digital space to use.  It could get so stressful sometimes. It should be understood that this is not easy at all. I get frantic every time I share my screen to my students.

            Still, every day I wake up with the same enthusiasm, no, it is more of euphoria. I still dress up, wear makeup and prepare my script. In the normal classroom, I stand at the center. With online teaching my students see me up close on screen. Not to mention, too, the possibility that all the members of the students’ household are listening to me…it is a crazy, crazy thing.

            No one knows when this pandemic will end. But for us teachers, we will continue to provide the youth the education they deserve…it is what we’re meant to do.