Technical jargon to bridging learning gap — teachers struggle to find work-life balance post Covid

WhatsApp — anywhere, everywhere

“During the pandemic, our numbers were passed on to parents for better communication. Now even though classes have resumed and parents can come and meet us any time in the school, they prefer to call us personally after school hours and take reports of their children. We understand that parents can be busy during the day to visit the school, however, that doesn’t mean that we are always free to pick up calls during our family time,” said Prabha Ajayan, a teacher from Indore.

Agreeing with this, a Lucknow-based teacher added that “in such cases, if you don’t pick up calls then sometimes it becomes an issue with parents. The truth is that we are not always in the right frame of mind, or at the comfort of picking up calls in our off hours,” Geetanjali said.

Khushi Jain, a teacher who used to work at a Ghaziabad-based school till a few months ago, added that it is not just parents, but even sometimes they get calls from school authorities telling them about a last-minute change in the teaching schedule etc.

Technology — boon or bane?

During the pandemic, schools adopted different online tools to help teachers and students bridge communication. While all the teachers that indianexpress.com talked to said their school gave them enough training for it, some of them argued that those tools, which were once a boon, have now become a bane for them as the workload has increased.

“Earlier, if a student was absent, it was their duty to sit in extra periods and complete their classwork with the help of fellow students, but now parents expect us to come back home and make notes of whatever we taught, and then send it in the form of a PDF on WhatsApp. It is a lot of extra work for us,” said Prabha (last name hidden), who has been teaching for nearly 30 years now.

Some teachers also complained that their school now expects them to work a few hours even during vacations. “This time in our school, teachers were asked to prepare some extra activities during the summer vacations and send them to students. For example, even though students had their holiday homework, it was our duty to create a new quiz (on an online platform) once every week and mail it to them. So I prepared the quizzes in advance, but I still had to shell out time to mail it to them every week, even if I was on vacation myself,” Roshni* (name changed on request) said.

Pratyoosh, a government teacher in Uttar Pradesh, presented another side of this tech-based problem. He shared about how a lot of schemes, policies, and resources are now available online or on phones, but that comes across as teachers spending time on the phone rather than teaching. “There are several times when I am teaching using some online tools/ resources, but people assume that I am just passing time on my phone and it comes across as ‘teachers these days are not serious, they just spend time on the phone’ kind of situation,” he said.

Adoption of technology in schools did not bid well for senior teachers who had never used a computer/ laptop so frequently ever before. “In pre Covid days, schools used to have a computer team to type out the question papers (that we used to give in written form). But now, schools expect all teachers to do it on their own. It might be easy for young teachers who are from the tech-friendly generation, but for people like me, it is a complicated process and I often have to take help from my daughter,” Prabha added.

However, there are some schools that are using technology as a tool to help teachers, rather than burdening them. “Our school has replaced the traditional blackboards with interactive whiteboards, and it is a good move. These boards give us the space to write more by scrolling through the screen, rather than erasing everything (like in blackboards). We are also able to now use different tools to retain students’ attention,” said a teacher from Pune.

Bridging the learning gap

Almost all teachers indianexpress.com talked to raised the issue of the learning gap, brought in by the Covid pandemic. During the pandemic, a lot of children had to quit school to help their parents earn enough to make ends meet. Now when students are returning to classes, teachers (especially in village areas) have to work twice as hard. “We have had to pick up from the start because many students had to take gap years during the pandemic, and that has taken them back to square one. So, we have had to start from the beginning,” said Pratyoosh.

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2022 also showed a drop in learning levels – foundational skills in reading and arithmetic. As per the report, in 2022, the basic reading ability of children in Class 3 dipped by 6.8 percentage points (from 27.3% in 2018 to 20.5% in 2022), and that of students in Class 5 came down by 7.6 percentage points (from 50.4% in 2018 to 42.8% in 2022).

A teacher from Pune also added that the initial years after the online classes were very tough for teachers, as they had to work twice as hard to bridge that learning gap and keep students focused. “Students got so used to having everything in digital form, that they lost interest in offline activities. They also lost the habit of writing, which became a major problem. So, for at least a year, we had to work very hard with them to bring their level of intellect and attention back to the pre-pandemic levels.”

Agreeing with this, Prabha also added that she believes the “quality of students has decreased due to online classes, and now there are some students who could be in middle school but unable to frame a full sentence due to their dependence on tech tools.”