Learning in Isolation
A look inside the West Philadelphia School District during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Ousseynou Nayete calls in from his dimly lit bedroom.
The curtains are pulled tight behind him, allowing only a sliver of light to peek through.
He is 18, a senior at West Catholic Preparatory High School, and has spent the last year doing school on his computer.
He gets straight to the point; he hates online school.
“I just don’t like online learning whatsoever. It feels like yesterday was March and we were in school thinking we were just going on a little vacation, and the next thing you know it’s my last year in high school, and I can’t do any of the things that I was hoping I could do,” says Nayete.
“I have regrets, but I have no chance whatsoever to make them up. “
Not Mohammad Chowdhury, a junior at Sayre High School.
He, too, has spent the past year attending school from his bedroom but has been thriving and has no regrets.
Chowdhury is shy and often felt overlooked in classes until this year. The online space created due to the COVID-19 pandemic that shut down schools across Philadelphia and the country allowed his teachers to pay more attention to him. He has taken advantage of myriad after-school opportunities through the University of Pennsylvania that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to access.
“I have access to more programs. There is no transportation time, so I just go from one Zoom link to another; I like it a lot,” he says.
Both public and private schools in Philadelphia have been fully virtual for a year. School now is nothing like what these 280,000 students remembered.
Gone is staying after class and asking the teacher questions, after-school sports and school clubs.
Gone are school dances, chats by the lockers, recess, and talking with friends.
While overwhelmingly most students share Nayete’s pessimistic outlook on school, for a few like Mohammad Chowdhury, the virtual classroom has given them a chance to thrive.
But it is not just students who have been affected. Teachers have had to throw out all they know about teaching and develop new lesson plans and get creative in how they engage their students.
Even basic classroom staples have changed. Online textbooks replaced hard copies. Teachers write in their Google Classrooms instead of using whiteboards and handouts.
The same situation, different perspectives.
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Ousseneyou Nayete, who prefers to go by Ouss, is 18 and fed up with online classes.
It’s not as if life was easier pre-pandemic; in fact, there were more barriers in his way then. On a typical day, he would board the Cherry Hill 102 SEPTA trolley at 6:20 a.m., change trolleys to the L at 69th Street, and finally get to West Catholic Preparatory School at 7:20 a.m. to start his day. His classes last 42 minutes each, and in between, he would rush down the hallway to get to the next on time.
Now his first class doesn’t start until 9 a.m. He sits at his computer, joining different classrooms until lunchtime when he watches YouTube videos. His mom typically gets off work and brings him Qdoba. He likes it but has gotten sick of this routine.
In the afternoons, he logs into his internship through the Netter Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He enjoys it but says he would rather be at football practice on Drexel University’s field like last year. He used to be fit, he says, but he has let that slide over quarantine. He tries to work out at home but lacks motivation.
“I go to the gym like once a month now, and try to workout at home, but I’m out of shape.”
For him, everything is different. And not in a good way.
His life has been flipped upside down, and it has affected his mental health.
“I feel like a completely different person,” Nayete said. “I used to be outgoing, but now I’m introverted and quiet. When they gave us the option to go back hybrid, I turned it down because interacting with other people is exhausting now.”
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Peter Ellis is an English and journalism teacher at School of the Future, a public high school on the corner of Girard and Parkview Avenue. He has worked there for eight years and before that taught college students at Villanova University and West Chester University.
He sits in front of his dual monitor, sometimes forgetting which one has the camera and speaking off to the side. Two expensive-looking bikes hang on the wall behind him.
The biggest challenge for him was not his change in teaching style, but rather his lack of daily movement. He complained he doesn’t like sitting for long periods of time and, as a result, took up cycling as a form of rigorous exercise to combat his newly sedentary life.
While there have been some setbacks, overall, Ellis said he is actually a fan of online teaching. “This year has taught me that I like online teaching.”
He has found it allows students to collectively focus on specific details of a text because he can highlight and underline certain sections with his mouse. He can more clearly explain texts, which have proved beneficial this year when online learning is hard enough.
“They don’t have the distractions of each other, so I find it easier to help students focus in on the details of texts.”
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Mohammad Chowdhury is the outlier. He loves online school.
He moved from Bangladesh to Philadelphia in 2019 without knowing any English.
He was 14 and was thrown into classes at Sayre High School, a notoriously underfunded public school. Not knowing the language or anyone at the school he quickly felt isolated.
“I cried into my pillow every night because in India I had a huge friend group and was talkative, but here I know no one and can’t even speak,” says Chowdhury.
His online sophomore year has been entirely different from his in-person freshman year.
Since going online, he has become almost fluent in English, has a 4.3 GPA, and is on the honor roll. He credits this to his hard work and the fact that teachers seem to care more about him in the virtual space. They encourage him to speak and answer questions in a way he never experienced before.
“They invest in me more than normal. In-person, I didn’t have as many opportunities to talk and demonstrate, but now I have opportunities to go first and do practice problems for the class.”
This year hasn’t been without its challenges, though.
He has been separated from his parents since moving to America. He lives with his older sister and her husband. His father is still in Asia trying to immigrate to the U.S. His mother and his five other siblings are scattered over two continents.
He has an intense academic workload, too, with dual enrollment classes as well as internships. All told, his days go from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. He even signed up for an extra Algebra II class because he “wants to understand it better.”
In between school and extra classes, Chowdhury makes time for three University of Pennsylvania internship and mentoring programs. “My mom was really happy I got accepted into Penn programs because it is my top choice for college,” says Chowdhury.
And while he said he was initially shy “because all the students were from big-city high schools and I’m just from a neighborhood school.”
Once he got acclimated, “ people saw I was smart and started to talk to me.”
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Sarmad Mera, 14, has mixed feelings about his freshman year at West Catholic High School.
Pre-pandemic, his day would start with a 6 a.m. trolley ride to school where he would eat breakfast before going to class.
Now, he gets up five minutes before his 7:40 a.m. first-period class and sits at his computer until 2 p.m. He sometimes eats breakfast, he says, but not normally.
He misses playing with the junior varsity football team after school. He also misses time by himself.
When he wants a moment to himself, he often switches his computer screen for a TV or phone screen to distract him in the evenings. On the weekends, he plays tennis and babysits and goes to his cousin’s house to work on his algebra.
Another thing he misses: sleep. “I’m in bed by 10 p.m., but my brain won’t let me go to sleep until 12 a.m.,” Mera sighs.
The near-constant screen time makes it hard for him to concentrate and fall asleep, he said.
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Online school may be coming to an end when school starts back in the fall, as many Philadelphia schools have already announced the return to in-person learning.
For most students and teachers, it means a move away from learning in isolation- a chance to talk face-to-face with peers, stay after school to chat or participate in sports.
It means a chance to resume lives disrupted by the year-long pandemic.
Nayete said he hated online classes, staring at sullen faces on Zoom- or worse, black faceless tiles- and being forced to do what he called meaningless work in breakout rooms.
Now, a rising freshman at Penn State, he is delighted at the prospect of starting college in person and actually going to school, finding a chair, and learning from a teacher in front of him.
And while he may be the norm, for a few students, learning online was an unforeseen gift.
It gave them the chance to thrive in isolation online.
They were able to participate in more programs since transportation wasn’t an issue. They did not have to get up before the sun to ride trolleys and buses to get to school or internships.
For Chowdhury, online school gave him time and opportunity to get ahead academically.
For Mera, online school may not have been ideal. There was a lot he had to give up. But the thought of getting up before 6 a.m. five days a week and returning to an in-person classroom is daunting.
“If quarantine ends,” said Mera, “and they let people stay virtual next year, I would.”