Alec Patton:
Hi there, we’re doing something a little different this week. Three seventh grade teachers from Cedarbrook Middle School in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania interviewed their students about what it was like being in school and out of school this year. And they turned those interviews into podcast episodes. We’re releasing these episodes of for three days. Enjoy.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed, I’m Alec Patton. And today I’m here with Isaac Stanford. Isaac, how are you doing?

Isaac Stanford:
I’m all right. How is it going, Alec?

Alec Patton:
Doing good. Do you want to introduce yourself? Tell the people what you do.

Isaac Stanford:
Yeah, sure. So my name is Isaac Stanford and I teach seventh grade social studies at Cedarbrook middle school and they have for about 15 or 16 years now, but the last couple years I started doing some work with project based learning, went out to High Tech High and, and met you out there and worked on a fellowship with you last year and then this podcast as well.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And that’s the thing we should say in Cheltenham, which is just outside Philadelphia, is that fair description.

Isaac Stanford:
That is a fair description, yeah. It’s adjacent to Philadelphia.

Alec Patton:
And so this year we started out with this idea that you’re going to make a podcast about a project that you did with students. Talk me through… What were you thinking you were going to do at the start of the year when you applied.

Isaac Stanford:
Last year, we had worked together and I had done this project called the Manual Cinema Project where I had the kids working in groups, recording and creating shadow puppets, cinematic shadow puppet movies. And so I had been kind of developing a whole wheelhouse of projects based on what I saw out of High Tech High and what I could implement in my classroom at Cedarbrook. So this year, my coworkers, Deb and Kristen talked me into doing this fellowship cause I wasn’t even going to do the podcast after trying to just figure out what to actually do at all this year. And so initially we were thinking about creating a podcast, chronicling a project that we did in our classroom, like I had done last year, but it quickly turned into just basically documenting the school year itself and what the experience was like for our students and for us. Cause it was so different then any other year of teaching.

Alec Patton:
And what was your breakthrough for this episode? What, what led you to the place where you ended up?

Isaac Stanford:
So the episode itself is just me speaking with students about what it’s like to be a seventh grader during this past school year. And it was really focused on trying to get some voices from students that came back in person. We started all virtually with students just on Google Meets at their houses. And then in February we came back and some students came back into the building in person, but we still had students at home virtually on Google Meets. It was a great project for me just because it gave me a really good excuse to check in with my students and talk to them about how things were going. And I think some of the students you’ll hear in the podcast enjoy the conversations and we’re able to say there’s everything from just a sit… You know what it’s like to be a seventh grader in the silly, goofy sense of that age, but also some very kind of serious and profound thoughts. I mean, it was a very intense year and the students really, I thought were very thoughtful in terms of talking about that.

Alec Patton:
Awesome. I thank you so much. Let’s play it.

Student 1:
What it’s like to be a seventh grader in 2021. It’s different, different, it’s different.

Isaac Stanford:
As with most things in life. Being a seventh grader was very different this year than it’s been in the past. Students, teachers, schools, families, everyone who’s life intersects with a school has been asked to reinvent and recreate what they do and how they do it several times over during the course of this year.

Student 2:
Well at lunch it was kind of weird because we weren’t able to sit close, which was good, but kind of weird. ‘Cause it couldn’t hear my friend talking, even though he was talking at a normal voice, which was kind of awkward for me.

Isaac Stanford:
Students had to figure things out on their own as we transitioned from one new way of doing school to another. They tried to figure out shifting requirements, class schedules, expectations, and what day they actually were supposed to attend school.

Student 3:
I have a… actually I have a group chat where we text, where we texting it. And we just talk about how many off days we had. We were like, yeah, including Wednesdays. And I was like, oh, we don’t have awful Wednesdays. So it’s been very psychotic and crazy.

Isaac Stanford:
For kids at home, logging into classes remotely. There was a lot to miss about being in school with other kids. Sometimes it was just the little things like being able to talk to whoever you want on a rainy day.

Student 4:
Being able to… In the… I don’t know, this is one of the main memories I have from last year is just being able to… it’d be a rainy day outside. And in the lunchroom it’s completely… it’s so awesome, ’cause you can talk to whoever you feel like. And I just miss being able to talk to people. But I kept… Whenever.

Isaac Stanford:
As a teacher, I became a live streamer, delivering lessons from my house when we came back to school entirely online at the beginning of the school year. In February, we transitioned to a hybrid model and I set up my webcams and green screen in my classroom to broadcast to students who had opted to stay home while also working with a smaller group of masked and socially distant students in front of me in the classroom, huddled behind their laptops.

Student 2:
The most difficult thing about this would be like the classes being online and how sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes link will work. Sometimes it bugs out and it’s laggy and I can’t hear anything. It’s.. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a lot of things that make it hard.

Isaac Stanford:
The technology glitches made it difficult for teachers and students. Sometimes trying to communicate just didn’t work or it was just too difficult.

Student 4:
You just talk online. It just, just feels too complicated, just like typing something and then sending it and then waiting for them to come back or talking and waiting them for them to talk back when you can just talk in person and you can just say, Hey and Hey. Just like seeing how our technology now is just being all laggy and stuff. We can mostly, we just hear… robot noises from each other.

Student 1:
Students and teachers had to reassess what was important and what to prioritize. For some students, the pressure to keep their grades up was just something that had to be put aside during this school year.

Student 3:
And some of the things that have been hard for me to actually look at that I barely don’t even try to look at is… grades. Even if I don’t get the particular grade that I want. I’m still like, man, I can do better. We can try again. So, yeah.

Student 1:
When we came back into the building, everyone had to get used to being in school with their masks on at all times. This took some getting used to.

Student 2:
It’s just weird because one time we were in the auditorium and I was leaving ’cause we had just eaten and I guess I had my mask in my bag or something and I was rushing to get out the door, to get to my next class and what I got out of the door, halfway by the library, I was like, wait, I don’t have my mask on. So I had to like get down and put it on really quickly. But yeah, it’s definitely really weird being at school and having to wear masks and stuff. And when you want to take a drink you have to do it really quickly. Sometimes when I… when I want to take my mask off, I’ll just pretend I’m drinking just so I can take it off for one second.

Isaac Stanford:
When we transitioned to having some students in the building in February, the kids that came back seemed unusually quiet for seventh graders. Everyone was trying to figure out the new dynamics of being in the building. Most of the students that did come back, seemed very happy to be in person with their teachers.

Student 2:
My parents and my brother, he’s the kind of kid where you’ll walk into his room and he’s underneath his chair and his computer on his desk. And he’s like doing those… He has no attention span. So my parents without a doubt were like, you guys are going back to school. I don’t care. So I was really excited to go to school ’cause I got to meet you and Ms. Sanborn and everyone. Mr. Rose hit me on the back of the head the first day of school. Being back in person has helped me a lot with my grades. But French and math are definitely still a struggle for me.

Student 1:
The decision whether or not to come back in person was very difficult for most families. Some students couldn’t return because of their living arrangements and the fact that they were in the same house with family members at high risk for COVID.

Student 4:
If it was up to me, I’d be in person. But I live with grandparents on both sides of the family. So I got to wait until we all have the direction to come back, so that probably won’t be till later this year, maybe in a few months. Hopefully I’ll be back by the end of the year.

Isaac Stanford:
There was a lot to learn as we transitioned from all virtual to hybrid, wearing a mask while teaching and learning was the easy part. Seventh grade isn’t easy in a normal year. These are 12 and 13 year olds trying to figure out a new way of being in school while at the same time, trying to figure out who they are.

Student 3:
The struggle for me is even though I may seem like a happy person and all because I totally am. I’m still trying to find who I am still as a person where I can level up.

Isaac Stanford:
On top of all this, during the school year, students were trying to process the huge shifts going on around them in society. A president who wouldn’t accept the results of the election he lost, protesters in the streets demanding social justice, random acts of senseless gun violence. We did our best to try to discuss some of the major news events happening almost daily in our Google Meet classes.

Student 3:
Sitting home on the computer, discussing some of these things. Some of them I actually write down and because I don’t usually say, and I should say it, I don’t usually say how I feel in class, but I write it down on a piece of paper. Where one day I actually had to do this little meeting where I had to say how I feel about the black lives matter thing. I had said, one of the words that I said is “outrageous”, ’cause it’s been outrageous and even discussing about it, it just makes me as a person, my heart drops every time I hear about anything that happened. As you discussed today, actually, and when about the incidents that happened in Atlanta and stuff, my heart still dropped. What I’ve been doing is I’ve been praying, wishing for a better outcome in the world. I’ve kind of stopped watching the news. Cause I used to watch the news. I’ve kind of stopped watching the news to where that stuff starts to happen. And I just pray basically wish that everything has a better outcome than what it is, that we can hopefully change. Meditate. I write down my thoughts. So yeah, that’s what I did today.

Student 3:
Actually Mr. Stanford, before we finished this, there was a last question that you asked me to describe the COVID-19 impact. And I said “psychotic”. I actually want to take that word back a little bit and I going to put “traumatizing”. There’s actually a reason for traumatizing because as you’ve seen the COVID-19 cases have gone up, or either gone down, and as you hear another protest, somebody got killed again. So for kids who are like me, it was, I felt like people might’ve been traumatized of seeing that all over the world. Because the world is like, people want the world to be a better place and we can’t have that if all of this stuff is happening to the world where we’re trying to make it a better place to surround everybody by good impacts, by good people. And we can’t do that. So I actually want to take the answer back and put that one there.

Student 3:
Friday, I’m just going to stay in the house. Just going to stay in the house, celebrate my birthday. But then after the Friday I’m going to actually see my friends for the very first time, because we haven’t been in school. We haven’t in school. Well, they have, but I haven’t. So it’s going to be like a first time that we’ve seen each other ever since Corona happened. I’m going to be nervous, ’cause I haven’t seen them in two years.

Student 3:
I’m looking to move on, but I’m not actually… I actually like seventh grade then I liked all my other grades. I feel like seventh grade, I liked this one. I liked my teachers, they’re all really cool, they’re fun, they’re fun to learn with. And I feel like seventh grade it was up and down. It was actually a ride where I can learn more things. I’ll miss it.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. This episode was written edited by Isaac Stanford and the music was performed by Isaac Stanford on dobro, Chris Coyle on bass, and Willy Lebowitz on mandolin. We have a new issue of our print journal, Unbox, that just came out. You can check that out along with lots more at hightechhighunbox.org. Thanks for listening.