After decades of teaching high school biology, Nicole Veltre thought she had a good grasp of the rhythm of the academic year.
She expected to see her ninth graders, who came from around the city, follow a normal progression of “storming, norming and conforming.” They would be difficult in the fall, then learn to accept the academic expectations, and finally get to work.
This year, however, those natural rhythms were gone.
“I have taught for 25 years and this felt like the first year of teaching,” said Veltre, peering through black-framed glasses, her wisps of brown hair escaping from a bun.
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The students who returned after an unprecedented rupture in their education spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic just weren’t the same.
Veltre has spent more than a decade teaching at Digital Harbor High School in Federal Hill. She is the science department chair, has led Outward Bound trips and has fixed bicycles with kids after school. She loves the work.
But this year she found herself feeling off balance. Like teachers across the state, she had to keep readjusting her teaching strategies, sometimes adopting techniques used for much younger children. Veltre doesn’t plan to retire anytime soon, but school systems around the state were bracing for “the great teacher resignation” after a challenging two years. In the city, early signs are that it has not appeared. “So far, our teacher resignations for this year don’t seem to be trending higher than a typical year,” said Sarah Diehl, interim head of human capital.
Still, teachers have gone through a difficult stretch.
After adjusting to online instruction in the fall of 2020, they had to pivot six months later to hybrid teaching — a juggling act that involved attending both to students sitting in their classroom and those who had tuned in on their laptops from home. Many were excited to return to in-person instruction last fall — even with masks and testing — hoping for a return to normalcy.
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“Most educators will say the 2021-2022 year was the hardest yet, with crushing workloads exasperated by growing educator shortages, a lingering pandemic, downright fear from increased school shootings, and orchestrated attacks from some politicians to censor our ability to deliver an honest and accurate education,” said Cheryl Bost, president of the Maryland State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.
Once back, students seemed to have forgotten how to interact with one another in the classroom, Veltre said. Students who had been halfway through middle school when the pandemic lockdown began were now insecure high schoolers. Others had simply cut out, telling their parents they didn’t need to go back to school this year.
The year prior, Veltre had gotten glimpses through the laptop camera of her student’s lives. Teenagers were tuning in to Zoom classes through their mobile phones while they worked in a restaurant or stocked store shelves. One girl would start cooking for her siblings during third period class.
Because so many students didn’t have internet service at home, the district decided not to hold a student back from one grade to another. So some eighth graders went to high school as much as a year behind academically and not having done “a lick of work,” Veltre said. Many had also lost the ability to sit still, wear a uniform and turn in work on a regular basis.
It took months of strict adherence to structure to get them more or less back to normal. Sometimes Veltre and her co-teacher would just have to stop the class and talk to students about their emotional well-being, expectations for their behavior, and their education.
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And it took a meticulous tracking of students’ families to get some students back in school. In one case, Veltre located the middle school records of a student, found he had run track, called the student’s middle school track coach, and located a cell phone number for his parent. The student finally showed up.
The lack of staffing in schools has also been felt across the district, as teachers and administrators fill in when they can’t hire a teacher or find a substitute, Veltre said.
“I haven’t had dinner in front of my family at the same table in two months. I am creating content for a health class because we are down a teacher. Somebody has to do it. I am not complaining about it, (but) there is literally no one to call to come in to do it,” she said, adding that the upside is that her new familiarity with the health curriculum may make her a better biology teacher.
The school system added “wellness days” for teachers that were supposed to provide an opportunity for staffers to catch their breath and have a bit of downtime. But Veltre said these became just days to catch up on work that had piled up.
In the waning hours of the school year, Veltre was still trying to cram the last bits of knowledge about plants — specifically cycads — into the heads of ninth graders who would take their exams the following week.
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She peppered her students with questions as she explained how the unusual type of seed plants reproduce, right after reminding them of the rules of the classroom.
This school year has tested the ability of teachers to balance the competing pressures of keeping students on track and helping them relearn how to be in school.
Sometimes, Veltre said, anxiety could quickly overtake her when she fell behind in teaching all the biology lessons she knew her kids should absorb. She kept a note taped to her computer to remind herself to calm down.
“Connection before content,” she would say to herself, focusing on a message from her principal to put the relationships with students at the center of all teaching this year.
The school system believed that students wouldn’t learn biology, English or any other subject if social skills and emotional well being weren’t attended to first.
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Veltre’s classroom walls are a riot of colorful charts and pictures that show a year’s worth of biology lessons. Five different languages are spoken in a classroom of students whose first language is not English. Her co-teacher specializes in teaching so-called English language learners, students who are struggling with their first steps in the country. A third of the students at Digital are ELL students.
“I like how she teaches the students. She helps all the students,” said Clards Stuppard, who arrived from Haiti on Aug. 24, 2021 and is now able to talk about the DNA of plants. Biology wasn’t that hard to understand, Stuppard said, because many of the words are similar in French.
Nearby, Furaha Juma, who is from the Congo and speaks Swahili, said she had been bored during her time learning at home and was glad to come back to school. “In person you can see your teacher. You can see and ask” questions, she said.
It is these students and others who Veltre calls her bright spots. “As grinding and tiresome” as the year has been, Veltre said, “there are bright spots.”
liz.bowie@thebaltimorebanner.com
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