TURNERS FALLS — Making a positive influence in the school community can be hard even in normal times. When school has been largely remote for the past year, it’s an entirely different challenge.
Turners Falls High School’s Earl McGraw Uplift Award recognizes a student and a staff member who embody the positive influence of former Vice Principal Earl McGraw, who died in 2016.
The award was recently given to biology teacher Megan Murphy and high school senior Ceci Wood. Discussing the award, Murphy and Wood noted the difficulty of creating a positive school community during the COVID-19 pandemic and their creative responses.
Student government is one of Wood’s favorite parts about school. Last spring, when it became clear that the pandemic would not resolve quickly, she wondered whether there would still be a student government that year.
“I really felt the pandemic weighing down on me,” Wood recounted. “I was trying to be positive.”
That fall, she debated whether she still wanted to run for student government again, considering that school would be remote indefinitely.
One reason why she decided to run, she said, was to help share her enjoyment of student government with younger students who hadn’t been involved before.
“I don’t think I would be who I am today without Student Council, and I want the younger classes coming in to have that,” she said.
The challenge was to describe what is fun about student government, when so little of it would be happening. Regional conferences are one of the major events for student government, and they were unlikely to be held this year.
Instead, Wood said she found herself pointing to less tangible things — the leadership skills and grown-up social skills she had learned through her experiences.
“I knew how hard it is to do things remotely, and I still wanted to keep student leaders engaged,” she said. “I was trying to extend the excitement of it to them.”
The pandemic introduced totally new challenges to teaching. But it wasn’t just the technical challenge of conveying information in a remote format, Murphy said. The impact of the pandemic on students’ personal lives was also an obstacle to learning.
“If you’re not doing OK as a human being, I cannot reasonably expect you to do high-level science,” Murphy said. “How can I bridge my science education with supporting them as human beings first? That foundation of trust and love and support — without that, you can’t put a science education on top.”
Checking on students’ emotional well-being became part of how she conducts class.
Right away Murphy realized that she couldn’t simply ask students how they were feeling. They would always point out the pandemic, she said.
Instead, she asked them for a silver lining — some small, good thing that they could enjoy or look forward to. Students would talk about their pets, or mention that the weather had been good lately. It became a lesson on perspective, Murphy said.
“Things can be collapsing all around you. Things can feel hard and sad and bad and impossible. And there can still be little good things that are happening at the same time,” she explained.
She started weekly surveys that included questions on whether the new teaching methods she was trying were working. She said it has been her most informative tool for teaching this year.
Murphy said she dislikes how political discussions on schooling in the pandemic have only focused on supposed failures, like “learning loss.” It disregards the creativity that teachers and students both have shown in adapting to the new situation.
“We’re learning. We’re laughing every day. We’re talking about science. We’re working collaboratively,” she said. “If that’s not what school is about, then what is school?”
Reach Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-930-4231.