Precious little good mornings
Teaching during the pandemic
Katheti establishes a column with articles about education, penned by teachers themselves. Maria Pateraki, IT teacher and Deputy Principal of Galata’s Junior High School, talks to us about her experience teaching during the pandemic.
If you ask me what I will remember from the Covid era during the period of online teaching, I will tell you about that time when the precious little good mornings started from the children, the mornings of those emotionally frozen lockdown months. That was a result of the futility feeling, I suppose. That time period cannot be precisely defined or placed. Good mornings that went from few to none.
We weren’t prepared
If you ask me what I will remember from the Covid era during live teaching, after the online one, I will tell you about the whole period when the precious little good mornings were just the starting point of the new normal at school. A normality that we had not foreseen and for which we had not prepared. Children expressed, in all possible -and usually difficult- ways, their anguish, their loneliness, their uncertainty, their trauma, their untreated trauma. All these express how they experienced the pandemic’s passing in their society, their community, their families, themselves. That time period is defined, as for its beginning at least, and it is the previous school year’s beginning. Its closure, as well as the way to reach it, remains unknown.
Now or sometime
We can only try, and we also know what: To give a little more time from our lives to our human face while we are at school with our children. A face that is vulnerable, caring, giving, tempered by the defenses that our role imposes. The face that makes all frightened creatures soften, listen, talk and return the care to us or the world. Now or sometime.
Maria Pateraki’s testimony about the way she experienced the Covid era, but also the live teaching that followed immediately after, did not leave Katheti’s team unmoved. We experienced the countless difficulties that arose. We felt that the conditions hindered our own intention to contribute to the young people’s preparation for their future life, whether through Greek language lessons or through skill building seminars.
That is why, coming out of this difficult period, we decided to reinforce teachers and the educational community in general. We donated technological equipment to schools and offered free membership to teachers and students, to facilitate their participation in seminars and all our activities.
Such seminar is the Internet safety seminar offered online by Maria Pateraki herself, in her field, on October 26th, at 6 p.m.
