Life During Lockdown: Carl Finer
Carl and I got to know each other through the running community back when I worked at the LA Marathon, and we both trained with Track Club LA. Carl is a teacher at the Animo-Jefferson Charter Middle School near downtown LA. He’s also been a teacher/leader/coach with the amazing Students Run LA program, where I once served on the board. That group trains about 3,000 middle and high school students every year to run the full LA Marathon. Over 70% of the SRLA participants are from below the poverty line, and training for the marathon is like Goalsetting 101; over 90% of the kids who finish the marathon go on to post-secondary education. It’s an extraordinary experience that illustrates the transformational power of sport. Carl is thoughtful about leading students, and I wanted to hear from a teacher about their life during the pandemic.
- Give me some highlights and lowlights from your first six months in lockdown mode
The week before our school closed in March was one of the more intense emotional roller coasters of my life. The prior Sunday I ran the LA Marathon. It was my first marathon since 2015 (I used to run LA annually) and all of the students I help coach finished as well. In hindsight, that day feels like the last marker of the “time before.”
In the week after the marathon, there wasn’t much time to celebrate. As virus updates trickled into our email inboxes, the school was gradually put into a coma, leading to everyone being sent home for good on that Friday. And in the middle of that week, one of our students was struck and killed by a car while walking to school. There was barely any time for the community to mourn and process the trauma.
In the initial weeks of the lockdown, I scrambled to keep my students connected online and put in a lot of miles running in Griffith Park with a friend to fill the empty time. I remember how intensely green the park was and how clear the skies were. We both decided that this was the most beautiful that we’d ever seen LA, and likely would see, in our lifetimes.
As the dust settled, I still had a lot of time on my hands. I felt compelled to do something to help and I needed some structure to my days to keep my anxiety from flaring up. So I started volunteering at the LA Regional Food Bank. Their downtown warehouse is only three blocks from my school and food insecurity was an issue in the neighborhood even pre-pandemic.
I also attended my first set of protests, after the killing of Andres Guardado in Gardena by two LA County Sheriff’s deputies. He reminded me of so many of my alums that I’ve taught and coached over the years and the details were so circumspect (a nod here goes to the courageous daily reporting by two shoestring news organizations: KPCC/LAist and LA Taco).
Most recently I’ve been on the road. In July, I did a 10-day road-trip with a friend through Northern California and Southern Oregon. In the past I might have been traveling further afield (last summer was an adventure and family-visitation hopscotch from Ireland to Tampa to Cleveland to Calgary), but the chance to see so many diverse parts of my own state was gratifying.
2. How have you grown personally and professionally during this disruption?
Personally, I’ve learned I can sit still … at least for a little longer than I realized. When everything first shut down, my parents said “oh, he’s really going to struggle with this.” I was worried too. But I’ve learned to put new structures in place and to just get more comfortable with not always having to be someplace or be doing something, as well as to live with uncertainty.
The lack of busyness does help to put the focus on what’s most important. With places closed, events cancelled, and people physically cut-off, it does sort of help you see the wheat from the chaff in your life (as long as I don’t fritter too much of that focus away down the social media rabbit hole). I’ve spent more time with immediate family and a few close friends, spent more time appreciating a handful of my favorite outdoor places in LA, and had more time to read and write (as well as, at times, panic over the state of our country). I might be most looking forward to being back in the stands at Dodgers Stadium. I miss the grounding and continuity of that shared experience.
Professionally, my job description has changed twice over since the pandemic hit. When we restarted in the spring we were on an asynchronous learning model. We would prepare the lessons for students to complete at their own pace, though be available to answer questions in a virtual meeting room during scheduled “class time.” This created an intense focus on the user-experience of our lessons. Mostly using Google Slides that students would type into, we had to learn to make them interactive for students, to record videos and screencasts, and how to align this across our “classrooms” to make the experience as simple and seamless as possible. It would usually take me 5–6 hours to create a lesson given the volume of tools we needed to create as well as testing and re-testing the functionality of the lessons.
Now we are doing our classes live, primarily using Zoom, Google Classroom, and Nearpod (an interactive presentation tool). It’s been a learning curve to master all of the new tools as well as translate best practices from in- real-life to a remote classroom. Like teaching before, I still feel like I’m juggling a dozen things in my head at once, but it’s taken a little time to get up to full speed on doing it through a bunch of platforms open on a pair of screens.
I’ve definitely learned that I can adapt. I’ve had to. And fast. That’s something I can remind myself of in the future in the face of change.
3. Has your relationship with your work changed as a result of being home alone and having to teach on a video link?
Well for one, I’m not even in California right now. I’m in Florida, near my twin brother and his family in Tampa Bay (including my three-year niece). I drove here in August just before school started. Given the most recent department of public health guidance in LA County, the earliest return to any sort of in-person classes for us is November. I’m guessing I’ll make the drive back west over Thanksgiving or the winter holidays, though of course that could change.
I teach sixth and eighth graders. I know most of the older students, but the sixth graders are new to me and to the school. Some of them are not yet comfortable having their cameras on, or just not in a place to do so. I’ve only seen a few of them in brief flashes on camera and really only know them as voices and names on a roster, which is still very strange.
One of the biggest changes is in how I work with the rest of our staff. My school is very collaborative. I’m used to being able to gather after school (or running practice) with a few teachers in a classroom to problem solve or talk through ideas, or flag down a principal or counselor in the hallway to alert them to an issue I noticed with a student. A tweak in a lesson in the front of the building in the morning may have spread and iterated all the way to the back of the building by the afternoon, and be turned into a new, sustainable system for the entire school within days.
We’re still like that, but now it’s more fragmented.
We still do an amazing job of setting up responsive systems. A campus security officer has been re-trained as student tech support, and a quick email or note on a spreadsheet leads to an almost instant response to a student who is having computer or internet issues. We still meet in departments weekly to align our lessons, analyze student work, and share best practices. One of our admin is leading a forum today to workshop solutions for addressing “ghosting” students.
But with much of the face-to-face communication replaced by text and email chains, tone is harder to convey and easier to misconstrue, not to mention responding is generally more time consuming or attention-diverting. Those informal interactions that spark creativity are less likely to happen. And I miss my neighbor teacher sending over a cup of coffee in the afternoon.
As I imagine with many newly remote workers, I’m having to learn new ways to set boundaries. With the work potentially limitless and available just by opening my laptop or pulling my phone out of my pocket, and with the delineation of time and space blurred, it’s easy to slip into an unhealthy work loop. It’s something I’d manage in the past mostly by not working at home (I had one coffee shop for planning, another for grading, yet another for my writing) and by plotting commitments and events on my calendar (like my regular Wednesday night running crew, the Boyle Heights Bridge Runners). Now, I’m still experimenting with new routines in a new setting. Though perhaps not too dissimilar from before, a lot of them involve going for a walk or getting on my bike and getting a cup of coffee.
There are certainly things I enjoy about working remotely. Especially with working in a different time zone, I now have my mornings free when I’m freshest to do my planning or write or go out on my bike, instead of struggling to do those things when I’m fried in the evenings after school. I don’t miss the commute. And of course, it’s freed me up to do my job from anywhere (like right now from Florida, and for about a week in the spring at my cousins’ house in Arizona).
One thing that hasn’t changed is the centrality of relationships in my work. Even via Zoom (and about a half dozen other applications), I’m still mentally exhausted, often frustrated, and sometimes gratified at the end of the day by having interacted with 75–100 people. What I’m able to build with my students, and what they are able to build with each other, is still dependent upon the trust and connection we build with each other. Just a moment ago I was responding to an email from a student I had last year who wanted me to give her feedback on a nonfiction narrative and another from a student getting a head start on transcribing her StoryCorps interview with a family members. And being middle schoolers, their quirkiness (and mine) doesn’t change in a virtual setting. I recently showed a class a box of Dunkin Donuts cereal sitting on my counter, and a few students insisted I eat some in front of them so they could hear the crunching sounds. They wanted to record it, like an ASMR video on YouTube.
4. Can teachers create positive change in the world during the pandemic? If so, how?
Kids still need to be taught. They need a place to explore and process what’s going on right now, as well as a place in their lives that can provide some stability and be a reprieve from it all.
I teach in a neighborhood that, even pre-pandemic, was weighed down by the burdens of our society’s inequities. The neighborhood is kind of where everything has been shoved that nobody wants to see elsewhere — metal recyclers, food distribution warehouses, marijuana growers and dispensaries. The produce that’s rotted or the waste the recyclers won’t take just gets dumped on the sidewalks, and that’s what we run through after school. Park space and health care access are limited and income stability can be tenuous for many of our families, who largely work service jobs or in small garment factories.
The least we owe our students, especially students like mine, is to work as hard as we can to not let the quality of our instruction slip during this time, even as we adapt it to current circumstances. Nobody is going to cut our students a break later in life because they happened to live through the pandemic.
And in working with our students, we need to make sure they have the skills and tools to make sense of this moment, ground their own inquiries and develop their own theories, and (now and in the future) drive their own change.
I think if we keep service to students and their families at the forefront, their needs will naturally lead into other areas as well. For me, that led to the food bank and the protests, and now writing about it and advocating for change.
This pandemic is widening inequities, but also revealing them in a way we may have been blind to before.
No matter where we teach (and even if we aren’t teachers) I think, with awareness of that, we all have a responsibility to act.
