John
“I hope, as a result of COVID, that there is a touch more kindness and tolerance in our society — nationwide and worldwide. It could go a long way.”
Teachers and coaches entered into the pandemic last year without a blueprint for how to adapt to virtual learning – how to continue engaging students, many of whose adolescent lives thrived on social, emotional and physical connections to one another. And for students who were already navigating the turbulent waters of teenage years, they were offered few options other than to adapt to online learning and to tap into a resilience they may have never known before.
The educational implications COVID has created may take years to fully recognize, but the pandemic showcased how so many educators, coaches and mentors simply refused to let their students disappear and fall through the cracks of isolation.
John is an educator and boys’ soccer coach at Rio Rancho High School. Throughout the pandemic, he taught online, seeing his athletes outside only in groups of five for ten months. A year into COVID, classrooms opened again and sports teams returned to the fields – with new teams, new schedules and a renewed sense of camaraderie.
This is John’s story, in his own words.
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I’m a high school Spanish teacher and high school soccer coach – and I love doing both.
I got into teaching accidentally. I was pursuing a professional soccer career, but I needed a job because soccer wasn’t paying the bills. So, I thought, “Well, I’d love to be a coach and if I’m going to be a coach, I’ll need to be a teacher.” My roommate at the time paid my rent for me; I had $100 to my name, and I went through the phone book and started calling high schools. I called them alphabetically. The third school answered and I said, “Hey, I’d like to coach soccer and teach high school.” They said, “Great. Come on in.” I fell in love teaching maybe a week into it. I loved seeing the kids succeed and just their human desire to learn. I feel really, really lucky that I accidentally found a passion that I didn’t know I had.
Fourteen months ago, I was teaching classes, having a normal spring and we started hearing the news coming from other countries. Two weeks before spring break, we were told we were gonna have three weeks of spring break. We thought things would clear by then and we’d be back at school and ready to go. As everybody knows, that’s not how it worked out; that was step one of chaos. Nobody was ready for it – nobody knew what to expect. Nobody knew how to handle it. There was no playbook, so people were scrambling from moment one.
Spring sports all got canceled tragically for those kids – especially the seniors. No graduation. No proms. So, the kids were lost; the teachers were almost equally lost. Thank goodness we, at our school, had some really good technology and really good leadership, that we were able to get by better than most. But, it was chaotic. We did the best we could; the kids, honestly, did the best they could while still being kids. At first, the kids thought, “This is fun. It’s a long spring break and we don’t have any homework.” And then it got crazy.
There were a bunch of us teachers who were working 60-70 hours a week; everything we did, we now had to figure out how to do it virtually, and none of us had ever worked virtually before. We were preparing slides, handouts, interactive presentations and interactive worksheets. Then we were putting more time in to figure out how to engage the kids online. Rather than having the students look at my face while I was talking, I thought, “Could I play a video or have them listen to this song or have them engage in an interactive whiteboard?” I had my students go visit a museum virtually in Spain for homework. We were learning all of this new technology and it wound up being a brutal amount of work, but…how fun to also be able to learn this new stuff.
There’s another side to the virtual schooling that is worth noting. It’s a smaller side, but important. When no one was allowed on campus, and everyone was sitting in their houses on a computer screen, there was a section of the student population – the kids who sit in the back of the class and never say a word, never raise their hand and try to hide – some of those kids thrived. I thought, “You know what, maybe it’s their turn.” Maybe a traditional classroom setting isn’t right for those kids. They have social anxiety; they’re super shy – whatever you want to call it – and some of those kids just thrived online. They could type whatever they wanted to say into the chat or they communicated with teachers through email and asked great questions. They could be involved in their interests and not feel embarrassed in front of the class. They could get stuff wrong and only the teacher would hear them get it wrong. So, there was a silver lining for the small percentage of kids who were really neglected in the traditional classroom setting, but were doing great online.
I asked students every week: “Hey, are you OK?” I’d put it as a homework question: “On a scale of 1-10, how are you doing?” The emotional toll on these kids will be a real challenge. There was that small group of students who thrived. Then there’s that other small group of high achieving kids who will probably achieve no matter what. But there’s a huge middle group – 60-70 percent of the students – where COVID was very rough emotionally. They all had some kind of problem at home. Maybe dad lost his job or they just didn’t get along with their siblings or there was marital strife. They all had that going on, and then they forget how to be students; they forgot that they had to turn things in or how to take notes. We’re going to have a very difficult time in the fall, teaching them how to be students again and bringing them back emotionally.
I got one email from a student that said, “I’m sorry I didn’t do my homework this month. My dad’s in prison and my mom’s homeless. I’m living with grandma and her Wi-Fi isn’t great.” Another kid was living with a single mom and she died of COVID. He sent me that email…what do you do with that email? When you get emails like that, you get a little perspective check. These kids have real things to deal with, so I made it a policy in my department to create as many positive experiences for kids as we possibly could – curriculum became second.
We’re going to need to be very aware of these situations when we return to the classroom in the fall. The focus will need to be on kindness, patience and compassion. I believe very strongly in setting a standard and a high bar. I believe kids will rise to the bar you set for them, so I’m still going to have a standard. But if a student doesn’t reach the standard, we’ll talk about why and how I can help him reach it going forward.
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In coaching, spring is usually the off-season for soccer and then in the summer, we start off-season season/pre-season type work, which is optional. Normally, the kids would show up and we’d kick the ball around for a couple of hours. That changed with the restrictions over the summer when we had to coach in groups of no more than five, and we had to stand at least six feet apart – so no physical contact. Usually, it would be me and 45 kids. But with the restrictions, it became five kids to one coach, and I only had two other coaches. So, we’d have 10 or 15 kids at a time – they couldn’t touch each other and we couldn’t get near them. We had to take their temperatures; they had to have masks on. We had to spray the soccer balls because back then, nobody knew how the virus was transmitted and everybody was scared of surfaces.
The morale with the players went through so many different phases. It was kinda like when you promise someone dinner and then you give them a cracker. Then you give another cracker. Or a different cracker. We would just keep getting little pieces, and then we’d get pulled back again. When word came out that we were able to play, the morale was high. But, then when the restrictions came down hard again, some of the kids took an absolute nose dive. We had kids quit sports; we had kids go into depression. As coaches, we all talked and said, “We’ll do anything. If we have to stand out there for four hours and do groups of five every hour, we’ll do it – because these kids have got to get out of their depression.”
We ended up with about ten months of pre-season because the season kept getting pushed back. Finally, it was solidly put that the season was starting on a certain date – which was one day after the restrictions on practice were lifted. So, we had one full practice before our first game. That was March 7th, 2021 and our first game was March 8th.
I’ve gotta credit the kids. We practiced in groups of four and five for ten months, and then had one real practice and went out and had a fantastic season. The first game was hilarious. Luckily, I knew most of my guys because they were returning, but I thought, “Well, I think I know a good line-up.” The other team was in the same boat, and their coach and I are friends. We laughed and said, “Do you know where your guys play? No? I don’t either.” We were changing lineups all game, but the kids had such a positive attitude about it. We played exactly half a season, which worked out just fine. I’ve been coaching for nearly 40 years and this was the hardest coaching season ever, but also one of the most rewarding.
I never had an “I can’t” moment throughout the year, but I did have a lot of moments where I thought, “This is too hard and something has to change.” When things weren’t working online, I had to change and make it more interactive. When I was putting in 70 hours a week and not seeing my family, I knew something had to change. I can remember a Sunday night at 10:30pm when I was working and I wasn’t done. I had worked all day, and hadn’t seen my family. I knew something had to change; it wasn’t sustainable. I made a deal with my wife that every Sunday, we would go for a drive and take time off to be with each other.
I think going through COVID makes us feel like we’re a flat tire with a slow leak. You feel like you’ve been leaking air for months until finally you’re just done – no longer can the car run. But, I believe that in the long run – I’m talking a decade or two out – there will be more positives from COVID than there will be negatives. I’m hoping that, as a result of the pandemic, the new buzz word in the education system will be “options.” Some kids absolutely need to be in-person and absolutely need the personal contact and socialization. And some kids need to be completely online. Why can’t we provide both? It’s not like we need the one room school in the tiny town when everyone is farming. We don’t need that anymore. When I’m in my 70’s or 80’s, I want to look back and think, “Wow, look at all of the change that came because of COVID.” I think about a lot of moments in history that must have been horrible to live through, but man, did society become better because of them.
There’s that general saying: be kind because you don’t know what battles someone else is fighting. That was so present this year. You don’t know what happened to a kid one morning. No kid wants to admit that their dad lost a job. No parent wants to admit that they can’t provide for their child while he’s at home – that they don’t have food or internet. My brother said it really concisely. He said, “COVID has stripped away everyone’s pretense.” COVID exposed who people really are – good or bad – but mostly good. It exposed what people had or didn’t have, and what their situations were.
As a coach and an athlete, you know what it’s like to lose. I think people who have lost – whether it be in competition or emotional losses – can bounce back better and can help others bounce back better. I think the most important thing is knowing there’s a way out of loss. In sports terms, you lose a game and it might have ruined that day, but there’s another game the next week. With COVID, we know this is terrible, but there’s a brighter time coming. We will get through this, and we will move on.
