These are the common feelings amplified in the minds of Michiganders in the wake of the pandemic. As teachers and students prepare to resume school, “normal” seems like a distant memory.

Sandra Gaddy, CEO of the Women’s Resource Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is also a current Executive MBA student at Grand Valley State University. She said that going back to school has been both a strange and stressful transition. 

“Although we have a small cohort, some of my classmates are not comfortable coming into the classroom,” she said. 

Gaddy said that she has had to wear masks throughout her Friday and Saturday, 8 hour classes.  Going back to school when the world is at the peak of a deadly pandemic, she said, has been a challenge.

“I don’t like to operate in fear because of my faith,” she said. “On the other hand, I also want to use wisdom in how I protect myself, my family, and my staff. It’s a tremendous amount of stress, yet my faith in God is what carries me.” 

Dr. Lisa Garvelink pauses for a quick photo break while preparing  her lessons notes for the Calvin Academy for Life Life Learning through Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Photo courtesy of Dr. Lisa Garvelink

Dr. Lisa Garvelink, an instructor who will begin teaching at the Calvin Academy for Life Life Learning through Calvin College in Grand Rapids this fall, said all her classes would be conducted on zoom.

“We were going to do it in a large auditorium and wear masks, but we changed our plans as cases kept rising,” she said. “The courses are for people who are 50 and older. A lot of my students are 70 and older, so we don’t want to put them in any health risk.” 

She said you can feel the tension around masks wearing which is mandatory in  indoor public spaces in Michigan.

“I do find that people who are so adamant about not wearing masks fall into a particular political group,” she said.

The pandemic has triggered political discord across the country, including Michigan. The unbridled politicization of mask-wearing amid the COVID-19 turmoil has also been exceedingly high. According to Garvelink, this dissonance could have dangerous effects on students. 

Rosine Hounakey, a beauty salon owner and student at Grace Christian University, also in Grand Rapids, Michigan,  said that when the pandemic first became widespread, she had to take a month off. She is the mother of three children.

“My kids were home 24/7 at that time, and when the pandemic hit, I had to stay at home for a month to normalize their schedules,” she said.

Hounakey said Covid does not scare her, but she is worried about her children. 

 “The one thing I am worried about is how to keep the kids wearing masks for over seven, eight hours,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s healthy.” 

Some schools are relying on remote learning to carry them through the pandemic. Other schools in Michigan have opted for a hybrid learning model. 

Chinedu Ikeata, an international  student pursuing a  masters degree in public health at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, said he has a lot of anxiety about the virus and his future.

“I  have this real anxiety of catching the virus in a foreign country,” he said. “When the pandemic began, there was a real possibility of potentially being sent home. “The idea of that happening terrified me.  It almost gives you a feeling of inferiority.” 

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Nor is he the only one. April is National Poetry Month, and many of the poets across the U.S. who would normally be reciting their verse at a cafe’s open mic night have moved their performances to online platforms. Bookstores and universities are hosting workshops and even running festivals through Facebook and Zoom. The Poetry Society of New York has added a feature that lets people book video calls with a poet.

González, however, was scheduled to come to New York for another reason. González is Garífuna, a minority group of about 600,000 individuals worldwide, who live mainly in Central America but have Afro-Caribbean origins. González had planned to read his poetry at a Garífuna festival in the Bronx. In a Zoom event hosted by King Juan Carlos Center at NYU, González talked about being raised speaking Garífuna with his mother and grandmother. He said that every morning, they would interpret their dreams from the night before. He writes in one of his poems:

“I dreamed that I had money/I dreamed of flowers/I dreamed of death/I dreamed that today we went/I dreamed of a Visa/I dreamed that today we went to the United States of Americaaaaaaa!”

His poetry is a natural for performance, whether live or on video. Sitting in his library at home, he read samples from his latest book, No Budu, Please, to an audience of about 40 people. His readings are dynamic and rhythmic; his translator, Urayoán Noel, compared the experience to a cross between a jam session and a mixtape. He draws out words, emphasizes certain syllables, raises or lowers the pitch of his voice based on who in the poem is speaking. Sometimes, he bursts into song.

Noel, a poet himself and a professor at NYU, said that they purposefully chose to read upbeat, high energy poems, partly as a way of cheering people up during the coronavirus, and partly because “if you read something that’s too subtle on Zoom, people are going to miss it,” said Noel. “They don’t have the kind of bodily cues, they don’t have the kind of immediacy of presence that you have in an in-person event. So you need to do stuff that’s, like, amped up a little more.”

Since González’s readings rely heavily on body language as well as spoken words, Zoom’s tiny squares of visibility present a challenge. However, González said in an interview that he also thinks that where Zoom limits his reach, it also expands it: the platform offers the chance to share his poetry with people on the other side of the world.

González said he started doing free-writing in notebooks when he was 15, to entertain friends at school. He described himself as a “failed rapper” or a “failed metalhead.” He infuses his poetry with elements from Garifuna music, Sci-Fi, anime, and Mayan mythology. He also incorporates the image of the “Kaiju,” a Japanese giant monster, and the spirit of those movies. The result, according to Noel, is both surreal and musical.

Noel said that one of González’s talents is his ability to take heavy topics like colonialism and turn them into pieces of art that are fun and engaging for the reader.

“It’s really difficult to do what he does,” said Noel, “to reflect those histories and those struggles, while also kind of re-mixing them in a way that’s totally fresh and totally his.”

While González’s poems are entertaining and filled with contemporary references, he doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of history. The Garífuna arrived in Central America after having been exiled by the British from the Island of St. Vincent in 1797, eventually forming communities in Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. González uses his poetry to introduce listeners to the history, language and worldview of the Garífuna, a people who have resisted against colonial powers for centuries, and for whom the effects of colonialism are still heavily felt today.

Because the works of Garífuna authors, poets and dramatists are little known in the U.S. González said he thinks a lot about how to transmit Garífuna culture to an outside audience. Noel said that he views González’s work as an “invitation to all of us” to “seek out” viewpoints of people whose art and culture are less likely to be translated, particularly that of indigenous groups.

González is currently working on putting together an anthology of his poems, while also taking time to do some writing. He says he’s focusing on what it means to be Garífuna today, especially in terms of the large diaspora that exists across Central America and in New York. The largest Garífuna population is thought to be in Honduras, which is home to anywhere between 98,000 and 250,000 Garífuna. Large Garífuna communities also exist in Guatemala, Belize and Nicaragua. Upward of 200,000 Garífuna live in New York City, mostly in the South Bronx.
González said he wants to make people aware of the place of Garífuna history within the greater history of the world. The quarantine, he said, is giving him plenty of time to think.

He believes that the arts can also help “shed light” on the way that the world is handling the coronavirus—perhaps not now, but for people in the future. “The arts are like a time capsule,” he said, adding that they “fix a marker” in a particular period of history.

He thinks the virus might even affect his own writing. “This is a moment sufficiently complicated,” he said, “to make oneself rethink everything he had been thinking he was going to write.”

 Emilia Otte is a NYU  graduate student in the Global Journalism program

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There are many aspects of this last minute change that are still relatively blurry. How do teachers provide tests to students online while ensuring that they’re not getting outside help? How do they make sure participation is still upheld when many home environments aren’t prepared to facilitate learning? And one of the biggest issues for teachers in minority-rich and low-income schools is how do they get participation and involvement from non-English speaking families?

Last year, I was a teacher at a hybrid elementary-middle school right at the border of Miami-Dade County. Forty-seven percent of the students at that school are Hispanic and for a smaller-sized charter school, this is a large portion of its population. Fortunately, coming to the U.S. from Argentina when I was young, my first language was Spanish, which is still the primary language I speak with my own parents. Due to the large percentage of Hispanic families at my job, nearly half of my correspondence and meetings with parents were in Spanish. I would also sit in on parent-teacher conferences for other teachers that needed a translator for the non-English speaking parent of a student in their homeroom.

It was hard to watch a parent hear for the first time, during their first conference of the year, that their child was in danger of repeating the grade. Some had not been able to read the conference request in English, some had not been able to take time off in the middle of the day during one of their two or three jobs, and some trusted their child to keep up with schoolwork while they worked to provide for their family. In my mind, this sparked several issues that I thought about even after I left the school – who needs to be held accountable for steady communication about a child’s in-school progress? Is it the teacher, the parent, the student themselves or an unrealistically perfect balance of the three? And with parent-teacher communication being such a crucial factor in any child’s education, how does a teacher encourage parents and students to be accountable for a child’s home learning?

Language barriers are not new for school boards and educators in the United States. The Equal Education Opportunity Act (EEOA) requires teachers to accommodate English Language Learners (ELLs) under federal law by removing any language barriers to the best of their ability. Most colleges in the U.S. offer English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching certifications and courses for those studying education so they are made aware of the accommodations they can provide to ELLs, such as the use of graphic organizers, dictionaries and text adaptations. But just as there are required accommodations for students learning English in the classroom, there should be a similar notion of inclusiveness for non-English speaking parents and families. The EEOA does require paperwork and forms to be given to non-English speaking parents in a language they can understand. But teachers and school administrators, especially in predominantly white areas, can still be neglectful when it comes to one-on-one communication and overall efforts to include a non-English speaking parent in their child’s education through conferences and email correspondence. What hinders this one-on-one communication? The fact that, even with an influx of students who speak a second language at home enrolling in U.S. schools, the majority of teachers in the United States are white.

Now, if this is a hurdle that immigrant families need to overcome in a regular educational environment, will this just get worse with virtual school? The simple answer is yes. Teachers are readjusting course materials, overcoming the cancellation of state testing in all 50 states, and figuring out different ways to communicate with parents online. Non-English speaking families, who already don’t get enough communication from schools regarding their child’s educational performance and data, will probably lack the necessary information to keep up with the rapid changes. They’ll almost certainly get typical coronavirus updates in their native language through the school board, but will it be enough to keep them fully in the loop while also being tailored to their child’s specific educational needs and responsibilities? And even though many schools in the U.S. have an ESL facilitator as part of the school’s ESL programwho can take up the role of assisting with communication among predominantly immigrant families, there is only so much information these employees can provide if they are not the child’s actual teacher.

So, that begs the question: Whose responsibility is it anyway? Should the teacher contact parents via an interpreter? Should the English-speaking child translate the information and relay it to their parents? Should the family simply learn English in order to be held accountable for their own child’s education? The answer isn’t easy. The teacher has several options for communicating with non-English speakers: translating email updates into their native tongue, requesting a virtual conference with a trusted interpreter present, translating assignments so that they can understand what the child is learning at the moment. However, without their physical presence, teachers are incredibly limited to how they can encourage participation among students and parents in general – and this especially holds true for non-English speakers.

The child then holds a great deal of responsibility in this situation. They can ensure that they’re up-to-date by constantly checking online programs like Canvas and Clever that showcase teacher announcements, assignment notifications and grades. This responsibility is heightened among children of non-English speakers because their family may not be versed in navigating English websites, particularly educational ones.

Back when I learned English in elementary school, I also learned that being responsible for my own education meant less stress for my non-English speaking parents at the time. But, looking back, there were several things that I missed out on – school trips, extracurriculars, even assignments – because the weight was on me to communicate the information to my parents (and this was before the complicated internet and educational programs came into being). And trusting a child to stay informed and engaged with limited parental involvement or knowledge is a gamble that can eventually be detrimental to the child’s education. For very young students in lower grade levels, the responsibility of accessing work and learning basic skills is almost entirely reliant on the parents, which can be incredibly difficult for non-English speakers trying to navigate an English dominated education system.

A non-English speaking parent does have the responsibility to assist in their child’s learning, but several obstacles can prevent this from happening during online learning. As parents across the country are becoming teachers themselves (and understandably struggling), how can immigrant families who are either unfamiliar with U.S. education or who may not have received an education of their own bridge the gap between online education and in-person teaching? Economically disadvantaged immigrant households are also often just struggling to survive, thus possibly lacking the necessary resources at home to see their child succeed in school. Many immigrant workers are still showing up for their jobs during the pandemic and are heavily reliant on an income to support their families, making it difficult to even keep up with communication if the teacher does attempt to reach out. Non-English speaking parents can feel an intense sense of discomfort and frustration when interacting with an English speaker, which therefore limits their communication with the teacher altogether. And these are only some possible examples of the obstacles non-English speakers face in American schools.

The solution to the problem is just as hard to address. As the country continues to figure out virtual learning during the coronavirus era, children of non-English speakers may very well fall behind. It’s easy for people to feel constantly overwhelmed during this time, and it’s very possible that schools and teachers will set aside the needs of non-English speaking families while attempting to figure out what works best for all students. As we continue to move forward with online learning for the rest of the school year, individual schools need to formulate a plan and preferably a team that will provide more resources for non-English speaking parents, such as translated educational websites, weekly follow-ups in their native language and more one-on-one virtual conferences with time flexibility, in order to boost their involvement in the educational success that they want to see for their child.

The post Virtual Education May Just Be a Non-English Speaking Parent’s Worst Nightmare appeared first on Pavement Pieces.