“First, you are a human with needs, then you are a teacher.”

 

Jasmine Diaz, also known as Ms. Jaz to her students, has been teaching High School math at High Tech High Chula Vista for two years now. She first went into the mechanical engineering program at SDSU after high school but soon realized that she was not that interested in it and later changed her major to “mathematics for single subject teaching.” Jasmine studied this all throughout college and started teaching at a private school before teaching at High Tech High.

 

Her teaching styles are very active and engaging with students. This kind of teaching style made it very difficult for her to adapt to online learning at first. She had to make some changes to her teaching so she can still keep the level of engagement as close to how it was before the pandemic. One of the changes was to have Google forms that allow her to check in on students and see how they were feeling about what they were learning and their emotional level. This change helped a lot because it allowed her students to be honest and to know that someone is there to talk to them if they are feeling down.

 

Ms. Jaz believes that after Covid, teaching should go back to normal, but there were a handful of things that Jasmine learned from online teaching.  Some of the things that she learned are to make sure that teachers check up on their students frequently and have one-on-ones with them. She also learned to deal with personal and mental health with more attention and not to sweep it under the rug.