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This Sunday afternoon, the world will watch the 55^th Super Bowl take place in Tampa Bay. While these football professionals play the last game of their season, high school coaches around the country are preparing for their next. Many of these coaches are tasked with balancing responsibilities as leaders on the field and as educators in the classroom. Among them is Chris Davidson of Ridge Community High School, about an hour outside of Tampa Bay .

Davidson has been teaching since 2003 and coaching since 1993. A walk-on at Temple University, Davidson realized he was too small and too slow  to truly compete at that level. So, he pursued coaching. He started his first coaching gig shortly before his 20^th birthday. Five years later, he landed his first head coaching job.

Coaching on the field led to teaching in the classroom. He has spent 14 years teaching Social Studies – primarily World History – and currently teaches Physical Education at Ridge Community High School (Ridge).

According to the Financial Literacy and Education Commission’s 2019 Best Practices for Financial Literacy at Institutions of Higher Education report, effectively engaging students and providing clear, timely, and customized information about student borrowing could be keys to reducing poor financial outcomes. Individuals who receive personal finance education in line with their goals may be more likely to retain the information and use it to make informed decisions. Capitalizing on motivation by providing relevant personal finance education to students at postsecondary institutions makes it more likely that they will put that knowledge to good use. In addition, this report puts emphasis on the significance of choice of major and graduation. Early decisions, like choosing a major, and equating that field’s expected return with the cost of attendance could save some student loan borrowers from default.

In March of 2020, I said, “See you on Monday” to my students on what I believed to be an ordinary Friday, albeit a Friday the 13th. That would be the last day I would see them for months. There was a period of uncertainty as everyone grappled with our new reality. The unadulterated meaning of pandemic, hit fast and hard. 

After weeks of educational triage, sending emails and hoping that students would tune into our online classrooms, the 2019-2020 school year ended with only a brief respite before the next school year began. March to May was rough, but how could we learn from what didn’t work during “quarantine teaching?”  How do we uphold educational integrity while still acknowledging that we are in the midst of a global pandemic and a fragile time socially and politically? The weeks separating school years were filled with questions like these. So many things left unanswered as the world we lived in was in flux.

Educators had to come up with answers and solutions. 

By Benjamin Herold

Given all the changes to public education in the past year, Carinne Gale felt lucky her training to be a teacher prepared her to work online.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Gale’s classes at the Boston Teacher Residency to go all-remote last summer, for example, one of her instructors adapted by using a popular video-sharing platform to post recordings of herself teaching sample lessons. The teachers-in-training were expected to post their own recorded responses, then digitally comment on those of their classmates. Gale laughed when the instructor said she spent her Friday nights watching the Flipgrid videos with popcorn and a bottle of wine.

This fall, though, Gale found herself doing the same thing as a student teacher at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Charter School in Roxbury, Mass. She helped convert a traditionally teacher-centric classroom math game called “Guess My Number” into an interactive Flipgrid activity.

A new teacher reflects on a surprising first year By Alicia Simba

I started my first day as a teacher last August, staring at seven little 4-year-olds who stared back at me through a quiet Zoom screen. I pressed unmute, animatedly introduced myself, and invited them to do the same, as they sunk into their parent’s lap or squirmed in an oversized chair in their living room. We sang “Old McDonald” with each voice cutting in and out on top of each other. I pressed Mute All to read Jacqueline Wilson’s The Day You Begin, and their eyes glanced at the illustrations before grabbing the nearest toy. Then, 30 minutes after we started, we waved goodbye, and I sat in the screeching silence of my apartment in Oakland, Calif., wondering, what next?

I began teaching transitional kindergarten in a large, public school district in the Bay Area, at a small, Title I, predominantly Black P-5 school. As a Black female teacher myself, I was aware of how relevant these demographic details were during the pandemic. Remote learning hit low-income communities of color particularly hard, thanks to a mix of limited funding, barriers to connectivity, and the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx families.

Of the many upheavals caused by the pandemic, the disruption to K-12 learning has been one of the most severe. First-year teachers like me were thrown into the crisis, beginning our teaching careers in the middle of a pandemic.