Sept. 28, 2015
What I Do As An Online Teacher
(Provided by CalPac, Monday, September 28, 2015)
Before I taught online, people aren’t really that interested in what I do at a brick and mortar school. When people found out that I am a teacher, they usually exclaimed with, “Wow, that’s cool!”
However, the conversation on the topic ends there. I rarely have to add more information on the matter. People generally have a good idea of what I do. Now, whenever people find out that I am an online high school teacher, they are always very surprised and ask me the following questions below.
• “How does it work?”
• “How many students do you have?”
• “Can you even see them?”
• “What is your day like?”
I sometimes feel very overwhelmed by their questions because with this job it is often easier to show them how things are done than to explain it to them. However, I never stopped trying to make them understand.
I tried to explain that virtual school enrollment is tuition free, and it is an alternative for students who might desire to do more independent study due to personal and professional reasons. Students would log in to do work in the online curriculum at their convenience given that they log in every school day and do work for certain hours as part of our school attendance policy.
When it comes to the number of students that I teach, I always say the number varies by the different groups that I teach. I have a set of homeroom students that I meet up with online at least once of week to go over their progress in all their courses and to give them support and guidance. I also have students in my regular content courses of American Government and Psychology and in credit recovery for those same courses.
My work is different every day. There are days in which I am busy answering emails and teaching live sessions with Blackboard Collaborate, and there are other days in which I am collaborating with teachers to provide more school connectivity like field trips for the students. Being a teacher is an infinite job. That has not changed as I transitioned to a different medium of teaching.
I often wish that I could answer people with a simple sentence like, “I teach online,” and everyone would automatically know what my day is like. But as technology is evolving every day and as more people begin to look into online learning options, I am pretty confident that more people will have fewer questions on how it all works.
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