“I think to have this global call to stillness - it’s not all bad.”
 

Celina Rodriguez is an 11th-grade high school teacher who has been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. She worked previously for non-profits, but became a teacher because she wanted to have a connection with students again. This pandemic has changed the way she has had to run her classroom. She has had to change the way she does projects and how she is teaching all together. Last year she saw her students ten hours a week, now she is only meeting with them for three hours. 

While this is a dramatic decrease, she has managed to find positives. One positive is that she has had more time to get her own needs met. She is now able to eat three meals a day and able to work in a space that allows productivity. She is also able to spend more time on her lesson plans and giving feedback to her students. While she would love to be able to physically interact with her class, she thinks it’s important to keep safety for everyone as a big priority. She believes that in order to go back to school we would need to use many resources that aren’t available to us at the moment. She would rather stay online until things have settled down than spend in-person class time cleaning and taking away from the time students have to learn. She thinks that Covid will impact her classroom atmosphere because students wouldn’t be able to come together in the same way. Last year her classroom culture was built on the physical interactions of her students, while this year students wouldn’t be able to get as close to each other.