‘Groping in new circumstances’

January 2020. The new school year starts well. The King David Victory Park (KDVP) English Department seems set for another good year. We have now been the same team of English teachers for six solid stable years; we haven’t had a single resignation in that time. Our 2019 English and AP (Advanced Programme) English matric results were excellent. Everything is looking auspicious.

From across the ocean, from China, we hear vague mutterings. Mutterings about Wuhan, wet markets, bats, viruses, and sickness.

But we are too busy settling into the rhythm of the new term, getting debating and public speaking up and running, welcoming our new Grade 8s, to listen attentively to the jungle drums.

Suddenly, the world lurches and falters. The vague mutterings become more insistent, more urgent, more sonorous. A strange and uncontrollable virus called COVID-19 stalks the world.

It’s time to batten down the hatches.

On 10 March, the South African Board of Jewish Education announces that its schools will go into lockdown three days later. Overnight, online teaching becomes the new normal, the default button. At KDVP, things happen fast, but in a structured and orderly fashion. In three brief but intense days of instruction, we, the teachers, master the fundamentals of teaching on Microsoft Teams. We prepare our individual subject-specific grade Teams pages; we meticulously invite all our students as guests to our pages; we upload our teaching material; we create videos for our students to watch. We are the owners of our new virtual kingdoms.

And then, on 13 March, online teaching commences. KDVP is now officially a remote-learning school.

It is, as Miranda observes in ‘The Tempest’, a brave new world.

Looking back now to those first days of remote learning, I recall both the profound challenges as well as the extraordinary possibilities lockdown created.

In our final departmental meeting on campus, we reviewed the core values and teaching methodologies that the English department holds dear. We were determined to continue with the key activities that define our department.

For example, we are proud of our reputation as a literature-rich department, whereby our students across all grades read widely, enjoying an eclectic mix of literature from different genres and countries. Every year, each grade writes a CAT (Common Assessment Task). The CAT is essentially a home-reading assignment which requires candidates to read two or three novels that align with a prescribed learning area. The candidates then write a long research essay on their findings. We didn’t want to drop the CAT because we believe so implicitly in the benefits that stem from reading. In 2020, the grade 8s wrote a creative piece based on The Little Prince; the grade 9s read novels to do with Jewish identity – the so-called Jewish project; the grade 10s considered the issue of cognitive estrangement in literature; and the grade 11s focused on the decolonisation of literature in the South African secondary school English syllabus. In spite of the difficulties of teaching and studying the CAT texts online, the English teachers and students persevered, and the CATS were successful.

As the year progressed, it was obvious that the younger grades found online learning to be substantially more arduous than the older grades. Grade 8 and 9 teachers developed new strategies to keep their young pupils alert and focused: frequent breaks; a mix of face-to-face teaching and watching of teaching videos; calling pupils privately on Teams to help them with their individual learning difficulties.

It was certainly a novel experience for me, an older, less tech-savvy individual, to suddenly be thrust into this new world. But, thanks to sustained support from my friends and IT experts, I adapted surprisingly quickly to the new demands. Teaching the matric novel, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian novel, North and South, online, was most enjoyable. All our matric oral tasks were held online, and I loved the new freedom of communicating so directly with my students on the chat function of Teams.

North and South describes the struggles of Victorian society to adjust to the new ways of the industrial revolution, a struggle which Gaskell describes as “men groping in new circumstances”. We too, thanks to the pandemic, were “groping in new circumstances”. Everyone, teachers and students alike, did their best.

That “best” was vindicated last week when the 2020 Independent Examinations Board matric results were published.

Nine KDVP matriculants placed in the top 1% of the approximately 11 500 students who wrote English Home Language. A sterling achievement, and ample evidence that online learning can succeed.

• Dr Elizabeth Leaver is head of the English department at KDVP High School. She has been employed at KDVP High School for 34 years.