Zoom teaching has its challenges for any age group. Attention spans, learning environments, and general stresses about being at home instead of at school are all very real and difficult issues that teachers and students are facing on top of normal school responsibilities. As I prepared for the start of the school year, I heard from other teachers that apathetic students would turn off their videos, mute themselves, and almost refuse to give any input into the class. While the stories shocked and scared me, I held hope that these very young learners would not fall into the category above. Preschool and Kindergartners aren’t apathetic, right? They love going to school, its basically just a prolonged educational play time.
As the first day of school rolled around, I had my lesson plans ready. I made fun games, planned songs and dances, and created kid-friendly slideshows to hopefully catch my students eyes. I was going to make them enjoy this first day so that they would be excited for all the ones to come.
And, they did enjoy it!
It turns out, for Preschool and Kindergartners, enjoyment and attention would not be the problem. The problem turned out to be my new arch-nemesis: the mute button.
I had heard from teachers who started online teaching in March that muting turned out to be one of the easy and useful parts of the Zoom world. For these young children, you could simply mute them and unmute them one at a time to let them speak when you wanted to: a preschool teacher’s dream. However, Zoom had other thoughts. Apparently, unmuting others on command became a privacy issue for people using Zoom. They would mute themselves, and then the host would unmute them to hear their opinion and instead would hear some type of unpleasantry in the background. So, Zoom changed this option. I can still mute the kids whenever I want to, but they are in charge of unmuting themselves: a grueling task, unfortunately. For the first day, I muted everyone upon arrival to the Zoom meeting before quickly noticing this change. My co-teacher and I then spent the next 10 minutes saying, “Can you unmute yourself?” in different ways to try to help them understand how to click that blue button. I had pictures of the mute button on a presentation for them to see, and after the full 10 minutes, only a handful had figured it out. Day two, I tried a different strategy: don’t mute anyone and just try to keep them quiet like I would in the classroom. By the end of day two, I could assure you that this was not the way to go. Throughout the rest of the week, we had daily lessons on how to mute and unmute your screen, and now, three weeks later, most of my kids can do it almost every time. Although muting skills was not necessarily on the curriculum for week one, it was just one of those hoops that we had to jump through before we could get on with the real education.
Besides the encounter with the mute button, teaching online has been going surprisingly well. Most of my students show up almost on time every single day. We sing songs, dance, and play games as they learn things like the sounds of the alphabet, CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant words that follow easy-to-read patterns), how to count up to 100, and vocabulary that they can use in their daily lives. I love hearing their small voices every morning as they enter the Zoom room squealing, “Good morning Teacher Jessica!” It warms my heart to know that as I sit in my dad’s office singing and dancing to a song about the weather, they are following along in a house in a country that seems so far out of my reach. I know this is not what I signed up for when I signed the contract to be a Kindergarten teacher in Myanmar, and I am crossing my fingers that I get to experience that life soon, but this one has its own magic, a magic that I try to revel in as much as I possibly can.
Comments