Caring through our Chromebook cameras: Our virtual week in middle and high school!
If you had told me last week that I would be spending my Friday morning squinting at an online photo trying to determine if a structure made of frozen slush was a "modernist villa" or just a pile of snow that fell off a roof, I might have questioned my career choices. But here we are judging this week's snow sculpting house challenge and finishing up a slightly different start to the semester. As a community, we have just wrapped up a week of virtual learning; that strange, twilight-zone existence where your living room is a classroom, your family pet is a lab partner, and I am merely a floating head in a digital box. It’s been a week of "Can you hear me now?" and "Please mute your microphone, we can all hear your brother eating cereal." Those flashback moments of the pandemic are very real for middle and high school, and I want to thank you for your incredible patience as we navigated this together from our homes.
I also have been experiencing the "joys" of the virtual world from afar. Those who noticed my background looked suspiciously like a Departure Lounge and sounded like a transit hub get a gold star for observation. I was stuck in transit at London Heathrow at the weekend until Wednesday, which means my IB Psychology classes got a very "applied" lesson in environmental stressors. There is nothing quite like trying to explain the complexities around culture and memory while a voice over a loudspeaker reminds everyone to "Mind the gap." At one point, I was teaching via my phone while on the London Underground. I would like to apologise to my Grade 11 students for the intermittent screeching of the tracks; let’s just call it an unplanned auditory experiment in sensory overload. As risk-takers at ISA, they leaned into the chaos. If they can focus on research while their teacher is dodging commuters and losing signal in a tunnel, I have full confidence they can handle any challenge the IB throws at them.
As part of the virtual learning week, we spent our Community Time this week building snow sculptures. We didn't do this because 'Snow-Fort Stability 101' is on an exam, or because the Physics class was investigating the structural integrity of a snowball. The real reason is a bit more human and gets to the heart of who we are as a school. We do things like the Snow Sculpting Challenge because virtual learning, for all its high-tech wizardry, can be a little... lonely. It’s easy to feel like a solitary island in a sea of WiFi signals. By encouraging our children to step away from the screens to be caring towards their own well-being and that of their peers, we turned a potentially isolating week into a shared and very fun experience.
When we asked our students on Wednesday afternoon to head outside to build those mini-dwellings or works of art, the goal wasn't architectural excellence; it was shared experiences and shared struggles. We do it to remind ourselves we live in the same world, battling the same frozen fingers and the same gravity. We do it to celebrate the "done is better than perfect" mentality and to encourage resilience. A slightly lopsided igloo allows you to see where the gravity failed, teaching you more about physics than a perfect igloo you only imagined. I saw some incredible designs, but I also saw some structures that looked like they were built by a particularly unmotivated squirrel. Both made us laugh and brought classmates joy. Both were brilliant. Most importantly, as communicators, our students found ways to bridge the digital gap. For thirty minutes, we weren't just "muted" icons on a Meet call; we were a community of builders, creators, and people who, judging by some of the photos, desperately needed to change their wet socks.
At ISA, we strive to be a kind and caring community, and we don't just "do virtual school" to check boxes. We try to maintain the same connection and spirit we have face-to-face; to build a culture where, even when the doors are locked and the cameras are on, we are still us. Whether we are analysing culture and memory with a teacher stuck at Terminal 5 or sculpting a three-foot-tall igloo in our back garden, we are practising the art of showing up for one another. Thank you for supporting your children as they leaned into the cold and the chaos this week, and thank you to our teachers for providing a sense of certainty and stability. Most importantly, thank you to the students for being balanced and knowledgeable in such a unique environment. This week has shown that our community is built on much stronger stuff than just brick and mortar (or snow and ice).
Stay warm, encourage your children to stay curious, and please remind them that for the next bad weather day, double-check that their microphone is muted before a sibling starts singing to the dog.
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