Parenting and teaching: Local educators balance doing both at once

For teachers who find themselves without a brick-and-mortar building to work at due to school closures, the line between educating their classes and parenting their own children has been blurred. Roberta McCarty, a Spanish teacher at Wellington High School, said she has struggled to find the right balance between work and parenting during the coronavirus pandemic. "My kids are a little younger, and I don't know whether that makes it easier or harder," she said. Declan is 2 and Maizie is 5. McCarty said the days of diapers are over, but there are spills to clean up, juice boxes to hand out and accidents to handle every time she turns around. At the same time, 105 students are relying on McCarty via email, text messages, video chats and online lessons. "It's doable, but it can be frustrating," she admitted. "I definitely feel like I'm working more now than normal, and I work a lot." McCarty said she feels less organized at home — and like many students she's been thrown out of rhythm by the statewide quarantine. She's tried keeping classes as similar as possible to how they were when held inside a brick-and-mortar school, just to give her students a feeling of consistency. But teenagers have adapted quickly to "the new normal" and have time-shifted their school work. They're not sticking to traditional schedules. McCarty said she's gotten a lot of messages between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., and she feels bad that as a mother she can't always respond to them immediately. "I'm trying to adapt. I'm pretty flexible," she said. "But this is hard." Teaching from home, the separation between work and home have eroded, McCarty said, which has deepened her identity crisis. She's had to put boundaries in place, setting aside time every day that is just for her children and making sure they get all her attention during that time. Her husband, Edward, has eased the load. A nurse, he has a schedule that has allowed them to split parental duties, she said. "He's kind of been my life support," McCarty said. "I think we make a really good team." Another Wellington teacher, Nathan Morris, joked that he is "cheating" his way through the trials and tribulations of teaching from home. His wife, Angela, has taught online classes for 11 years, and was primed to help set up an at-home workspace for the high school math instructor to teach his 98 students. "Anything that I've done, I've stolen from her," he said. The Morrises are parents to three girls: Fynlee, a third-grader; Camryn, a sixth-grader; and Taylor, an eighth-grader. Each has a designated workspace, and parents and kids keep the same school hours, scheduling regular breaks for heading outside, playing online and video-chatting with friends. "We're all working at the same time, essentially. And if they need help, we make time after," Nathan Morris said. He is thankful that school is still being held virtually. Without assignments to complete and grades to get, the shutdown would be far more challenging, Morris said — instead of a grind, school "is definitely an outlet for them," he said. The family is missing the social aspects of the school year, such as theater productions, travel basketball and track. "There's definitely some different stress that goes along with it all ... but I feel like we're functioning OK," Morris said. Avon Schools teachers Mike and Kim Fitch are no strangers to seeing each other at work. The husband-and-wife duo teach math in side-by-side classrooms at Avon High School. But now they are working more closely than ever before, teaching more than 250 students combined from the same house, all while looking after their own kids, Parker, 7, Addison, 5, and Case, 4. "When we are at work normally, we have a routine and we know what is going to happen when," said Kim Fitch. "I feel like now, I am bouncing back and forth trying to teach my kid to read in kindergarten and then jumping over to my computer five minutes later to respond to an email, or trying to make a video lesson while my kids are screaming in the background." Mike Fitch said it has been difficult to make the transition online and not see his students on a regular basis. "I know why we went into education is the relationship with kids and the interactions, and that's gone," he said. Learning math over a screen is not as simple as on a whiteboard, some students have expressed to him. But for his own children in elementary school, he said it has been beneficial for them to have weekly Zoom calls with their teachers and classmates. "They need that. That's what half of education has been down there. It's just the social interactions and everything," he said. Avon Lake Schools kindergarten teacher Julie Norris said video tools that allow students to interact with her and their classmates fill the void created by the cancellation of in-person class. "It's kind of sad; we are missing each other, but this is helping," she said. Norris said she was a little apprehensive about recording herself on educational programs like Flipgrid and SeeSaw, but she has grown more comfortable through the transition to remote learning. Between that and weekly video chats, her Westview Elementary students have been getting "that social piece" of education they were missing, she said. The transition to remote school work has gone better for some students than others, Kim Fitch has noticed. She said some of her typically reliable students have been struggling to complete assignments because of their home situations. "Kids who normally are up to date with doing their homework all the time, I'm noticing, 'Hey you didn't turn your assignment in,'" she said. "When I reach out, they say, 'I'm sorry, there's just a lot going on at home. I have five kids in my house right now and we're all fighting in computer time.'" Despite the challenges, Kim Fitch said this experience has been eye-opening for her. She and other teachers she has talked with miss their students so much, she said, that it has renewed her faith in the education system. Contact Dylan Reynolds at (440) 329-7123 or dreynolds@chroniclet.com. Follow him on Twitter @drey1357. Contact Jason Hawk at (440) 329-7122 or news@lcnewspapers.com.