Face-to-face Teaching during a pandemic -My Experience-

Teaching during a pandemic was not a summer 2020 goal of mine, however, I had no other thing to pursue at these times.

        

Picture by Miroslava Chrienova from Pixabay

    You might have read my old posts where I mentioned about my teaching experience last year. I continued my part-time job/practice until the pandemic burst in Turkey. When things started to get "normal" ministries decided to re-open businesses and certain private courses in June. The course I work at also suggested me to work with them on their Summer School. I took the job and started teaching.

Precautions at the teaching environment

  Before even talking about teaching itself, we had to create a safer environment for ourselves and students. The first precaution was to lower the student population which was not that hard since parents did not want to send their children to an area of possible danger. There was a certain calculation. X number of students for Y number of square meters. For instance, on my morning shift, we had 4 classes in total almost 35 students. If there weren't any COVID, all 11 classes would be completely full -let's say 10-12 students per class. I only had 5 students. We also separated break time for each class. Only two classes had a break at the same time.

Precautions for individuals

All of the staff and attendants had to wear masks. It was made compulsory in certain cities because of the high number of positive cases. Even during the lessons, everyone had to wear a mask. In the entrance, everyone's temperature was taken and everyone had to use a hand sanitizer. Luckily, we didn't have to send a student home or hospital because of the high temperature or anything. 

    Overall, it was a different experience for me. In the beginning, we were more careful than we are now. I've been working for two and a half months now. I can see that even though we warn students about dangers they can sometimes act like it's a normal virus-free time.

    The thing that was affected the most was group-work. Because of social distancing, I had to narrow down the games and activities in the classroom. It was not a huge problem but still, it affected the teaching environment.

I'll be posting more about my progress. Keep in touch!