By CHERYL ROMANO/YachatsNews.com
In the first year of her 40-year teaching career, Amanda Middlebrooks remembers showing a little boy pictures of vegetables during a reading class.
“What’s that?” the 6-year-old said, pointing to onions. Middlebrooks told him, and he replied, “Oh yes, onions, the enemy of my eyes.”
Moments like that are diffused through decades of teaching little ones the basics, but there’s nothing basic or routine about teaching in the era of coronavirus for the first-grade teacher at Crestview Heights School in Waldport. As she winds up her professional teaching life – she is contemplating retirement this year or next — Middlebrooks has much to look back on, but also to gear up for, in a continuing pandemic.
Most of the fall Middlebrooks and her teaching teammate, Anna Kelley, worked in a “hybrid” model of in-class and online instruction. Two days a week, they each have their seven students in the classroom, masked, six feet apart. Two other days, they each teach live, online. On the third day, students work on assignments at home.
When school resumed this week Middlebooks was back conducting classes all online after a post-Thanksgiving spike in COVID-19 cases in Lincoln County. Instead of bringing back more grades in mid-December, district administrators decided to halt the transition and return everyone to all online classes through January.
On Thursday the district announced it would resume two days in class and three days online for kindergarteners through six-graders on Feb. 1, then have seventh through 12 grades do the same on Feb. 8. It would be the first time in school for most fourth- through 12-graders since last March.
Changing the whole teaching model
It’s been nine months since Oregon schools shut due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions, and nine months since the state’s teachers started scrambling to adapt.
“Imagine being in the profession for 40 years,” said Crestview principal Mike Gass, “and all of a sudden in your last year, you have to change your whole teaching model. This COVID year tests the mettle of all of us; Amanda’s willingness to take it all on has been amazing.”
Part of what Middlebrooks and her colleagues took on was making videos for students to augment “virtual” classes online.
“We started making those videos in the spring, after the shutdown,” she recalled. “You couldn’t pause them, so if you got to the end and the dog started barking, you’d have to start over.”
And online classes have their own challenges. “Online, once you say, ‘Take a break and come on back’, you have to hope they’ll all come back.”
Last spring the Lincoln County School District provided one laptop per family. This fall, every student got one, along with a high-speed internet connection where possible.
“Some kids didn’t have a computer in their house, and now they’re on it every single day.” Students and families are aided in navigating online learning through take-home kits, or “dashboards,” distributed just before the start of hybrid classes this fall. The brainchild of Gass, these large, tri-fold displays (think science fair exhibit) hold math and reading materials, passwords, crayons and more to give students a central, portable study place.
From Portland to South Korea to Crestview
Although COVID pushed traditional teaching aside for a while, Middlebrooks’ technology learning curve wasn’t as steep as it was for some. She taught herself to use a computer while working temporarily in between teaching jobs in the late 1990s. She even considered making computers a career, but quickly realized “I have to be in a school.”
From her first job at an elementary school in southern California, the Oregon native and Newport resident zigzagged from teaching posts in her native Portland, to South Korea teaching English at a private school, to Siletz School, to a military base school in Fort Hood, Texas, and ultimately to Crestview, where she has worked the last 16 years.
Still, the shutdown last March forced her — like so many others — to “learn a new language: Google. Google Classroom, Google Meet … we’d be live in front of the kids, trying to teach the best we could. Virtual learning was new to all of us, and our staff and leadership are working through everything together as we go along.”
Faith Forshee, a sixth-grade teacher at Crestview has known and worked with Middlebrooks for 11 years.
“Amanda is old school, but at the same time, a technology-minded person,” Forshee said. “She is the type of person who is always positive, always welcoming. She’s a solid teacher who is 100 percent dedicated to having her kids ‘get it’ — she keeps on and on until they’ve got it.”
Forshee says her husband, who also works at Crestview as lead custodian, is another fan of Middlebrooks. “He always tells me Amanda is one of his favorite people — he can laugh and joke, and have a friend on staff. That’s the way a lot of the teachers feel about Amanda — she’s definitely an advocate for kids, and will be missed.”
“Every kid can learn”
While she debates retirement, there are still months to go before anyone has to worry about missing Middlebrooks. In the meantime, she’ll keep applying her belief that “Every kid can learn; every child has value and purpose. Every kid is going to learn to read before they leave my classroom.”
It reminds her of one of her most memorable “Aha!” moments with a first-grader. “I was reading with the class, and suddenly one boy exclaimed, ‘Oh! I’m reading!’”
That, she said, is “big stuff.”
Middlebrooks herself expects to miss her “kiddos” deeply — but maybe not as much as they’ll miss her.
“Last year the kids were excited about my birthday and greeted me with so many cards, but one little guy who was especially exuberant was absent,” she recalled.
Later that afternoon, the boy had a choice to go home after an appointment, but insisted that he had to go back to school to wish his teacher happy birthday and offer his gift.
Middlebooks has many stories like that one. “These things I will miss,” she said. Middlebrooks herself has no children. “I’ve always poured my heart into my classroom.”
Whenever she decides to retire, “I know I’ll be in a school somewhere, somehow, sometime … wherever I can be used.”
- Cheryl Romano is a Yachats freelance reporter who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. She can be reached at Wordsell@gmail.com