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I teach five- and six-year-olds at a progressive independent school on Manhattan\u2019s Upper West Side. We\u2019re a very child-focused school, and think a lot about what\u2019s developmentally appropriate. I really appreciate this approach, which includes giving children ample outdoor time (about an hour a day), unstructured time in the classroom, and lots of hands-on activities, including my favorite, wooden unit blocks. I don\u2019t have any technology for children in my classroom, and we don\u2019t give homework. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there was a global pandemic. Suddenly, parents want worksheets (I don\u2019t have any), and I\u2019m actually asking children to be on a screen (usually, I fully support families who have no screen time at all, and I wouldn\u2019t dream of telling them to plop their child in front of a computer). But things are different, and now I\u2019m having Zoom meetings with seventeen five- and six-year-olds, and counting myself lucky that I only have seventeen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, the children act just as I would expect. They\u2019re five and six; they can\u2019t sit still for very long, and expecting them to all wait their turn to talk when there\u2019s nothing else happening is absurd. In our first meetings, we observed children rolling around on the floor, playing with their backgrounds, putting their faces very close to the camera to see what would happen (Can I see up my own nose? Let\u2019s find out!), doing a variety of what could generously be called yoga poses, wiggling their toes in front of the camera, and, generally, doing all the age-appropriate things I would have predicted they would do when faced with a new, kind of weird way of interacting with the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I allowed myself to feel curious. Why wouldn\u2019t they try to figure out this new thing? How would they know how to act? And it occurred to me: we spend the first six weeks of school teaching children routines, expectations, transitions; in short, how to be in school. We explicitly model and teach how to sit in meeting, how to act during a read aloud, how to transition from lunch to rest. Even though they all come from school environments that have similar expectations, we still spend six weeks reviewing and re-teaching. Lots of teachers do this; there\u2019s even a great book for teachers called, The First Six Weeks of School<\/em>.<\/a> And now, it\u2019s the equivalent of September, and I\u2019m confused about why they don\u2019t know how to be in a Zoom meeting? Of course<\/em> they don\u2019t know; I never taught them! So I realized we needed to teach them. But how? We\u2019re not there, and, obviously, a Zoom meeting where they\u2019re upside down is not the best place to teach them to not be upside down during a Zoom meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My brilliant colleague Anna does a project with her class every year when they make up class rules. They make a book, based on David Shannon\u2019s classic, No, David!<\/em><\/a> called, No 5-6s!<\/em> She takes pictures of the children doing ridiculous things, and pairs it with text, like, \u201cNo, 5-6s, we don\u2019t put the blocks on our heads! We put them on the shelves.\u201d \u201cNo, 5-6s, we don\u2019t just start cleaning up someone else\u2019s structure, we ask if they want help!\u201d This gave me an idea. Why didn\u2019t we make a Zoom video of the 5-6s teachers doing all the wrong things? Then the kids could laugh at us, we could tell them what we needed them to know, and, hopefully, we\u2019d be spared the up-the-nose views coming from the Golden Gate Bridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I made a list of the Zoom behaviors that were the worst offenders, and talked to my colleagues. They added some of their own, and we each picked one or two. I even got Anna to include her daughter, a former student of mine, in the fun. We talked it through, and did it one take \u2013 it\u2019s pretty rough, but also pretty funny. I hear kids laughed when they saw it, and we\u2019ve seen a marked difference in their behavior during our small group Zoom chats. They still sometimes put their toes on the screen during whole group times, but, then again, who hasn\u2019t wondered if anyone else will notice what\u2019s happening in that tiny box on their screen? I know I have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n