File photo.
The schools of Colombia were empty due to the pandemic in 2020. (Credit: LUIS ROBAYO / AFP via Getty Images)
(CNN Spanish) --
When the new coronavirus that causes the covid-19 disease - unknown until then - came by leaps and bounds to Colombia, Patricia, a teacher at a primary school in Concepción, Santander, in the northeast of the country , she felt confused about what could happen to her and her students.
"The truth is that I was afraid because we didn't know what was going to happen," Patricia, a teacher who has practiced her profession for more than 45 years, told CNN.
She asked that her name not be revealed to protect her privacy.
In March 2020, when the Government of Colombia ordered the suspension of face-to-face classes due to covid-19, Patricia felt anguish and uncertainty for the children and for herself.
Like some 63 million teachers around the world whose activities were affected by the covid-19 pandemic, according to UNESCO, Patricia had to change the way she was traditionally going to teach. He went from more than four decades of teaching face-to-face classes to trying to teach classes online, as well as rethinking in record time how to continue with an educational normality that was no longer the same.
"The truth was very, very difficult, distressing. And I say in a certain way (that it was) like exasperating, and the helplessness of not being able to carry out the work in the best way was felt, but rather what was moderately possible", says Sara, another rural teacher also from Concepción, Santander, when talking about how difficult the sudden change to virtual education was.
Sara is not the real name of the teacher, who for privacy reasons asked not to reveal her name.
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This is the drama of millions of teachers in rural and underprivileged areas that continues to this day, two years after the start of the pandemic that forced them to switch to distance education.
And the virus is still present.
Some common problems for teachers
CNN spoke with several professors from different parts of Colombia to ask them about their concerns during the pandemic.
Several of them agreed on two common points: the difficulties of using technology massively and the loss of interest of the students.
Sara and Patricia, who have been primary school teachers for decades, had to put aside traditional teaching, and connect to a modality that they knew little about.
"Not all the children had an internet connection. They didn't all have a phone with WhatsApp either. Some didn't even have a cell phone, so they had to go to the neighborhoods. Sometimes the father of the family was given an explanation by phone and he had to guide her son," Sara says of the early days of the pandemic, in 2020.
They even distributed the study guides door to door, for those who could not attend classes by phone or internet, due to lack of resources.
About 400 kilometers to the center of the country, Miriam Luengas, a Spanish teacher in the municipality of Facatativá, in Cundinamarca, in the center of the country, said that virtual teaching was difficult because "it was like starting from scratch, through a screen or a message, to explain to them".
"You couldn't make much headway because as the internet connection is so intermittent, some of them failed and couldn't connect to class, and others because they just didn't want to, they didn't connect," he told CNN.
Patricia tells the same about her students' loss of interest.
"Technology as a work tool is good, but can it replace the classroom? I don't think so," he says.
"The parents said 'oh, teacher! It's that the children no longer want to be but glued to the cell phone, but it's not doing what you tell them to do, but watching the little games,' and that was a problem for most of the children. ", bill.
"The ones who were doing the work were the parents, not the children."
The students' loss of interest in studying was also experienced by Katherine Vásquez, a math teacher in the municipality of Facatativá, who said that at first she wanted to do many activities, but after a month at this rate, it was necessary to rethink how to put your students to be 100% in front of a computer.
"The isolation situation that we had since March 2020 challenged us to rethink those teaching processes," Vásquez told CNN.
"It was necessary to think about how good it was to sit the students in front of a screen for 6 hours, if they were enthusiastic about all those tools that I was placing them, and if they were learning, which I think was the fundamental part."
And tedium became part of the virtual routine for Paulo César Ruiz, another teacher, who said he had "mental exhaustion" after months of the pandemic.
"You always expect students to be participatory," he said.
"But as time went by, something very hard was the permanent absenteeism of many students who for economic reasons, motivations, family or economic reasons began to be absent. So that involuntarily created a level of stress, fatigue, mental exhaustion as emotional," Ruiz told CNN.
Absenteeism and other difficulties
In mid-April 2020, almost every country in the world ordered the closure of schools and other educational institutions due to the covid-19 pandemic.
This affected more than 1,570 million students worldwide, which according to UNESCO was more than 90% "of the total school population enrolled in the world."
Absenteeism was a common situation during the pandemic for many students.
According to a UNESCO report from September 2021, the prolonged closures due to the pandemic in the last two years have caused "learning loss and an increase in the dropout rate."
This situation was caused by the closure of schools for 18 months, something that affected some 77 million students, according to the UN entity.
But while these measures were necessary to stop the spread of the pandemic, UNESCO also warned at the time that these measures could "provoke a global learning crisis at all levels of the education system."
Mary Guinn Delaney, a UNESCO public education expert, pointed out that one of the problems is the digital divide in Latin American countries, which in turn generated educational problems during the pandemic.
"Willingness to participate in online or virtual education has to do with access to the internet itself, the level of privatization," Delaney told CNN.
"Many teachers, for example, were using their personal plans that they pay for to be able to do their classes via WhatsApp."
According to Delaney, the pandemic has highlighted long-standing difficulties — including the digital divide — that have led to educational lags.
And this should be a starting point for changes in public policies.
"If we already knew that internet access was lacking at school, how can we expect in the very short term that a teacher can replicate even better conditions (to teach) from home?" said the UNESCO expert.
Some positive experiences
Lizandro Malagón, an English teacher in the municipality of San José de la Montaña, in the department of Antioquia, in northwestern Colombia, says that although it was challenging to teach virtual classes, he also thanks technology for being the means to continue with their work despite the pandemic.
"Those resources were the ones that solved all the communication problems we had in the educational field and also suggested many resources to be able to find all the knowledge that we found daily in the classrooms," said the teacher from San José de la Montaña.
For Janeth Maldonado, an English teacher in the municipality of Facatativá, in Cundinamarca, virtual teaching was something positive since the number of online resources allowed her to continue with her classes online.
Although she says that she had difficulties working with children who were not used to taking classes online and it is a process that requires a lot of responsibility, on a personal level she felt comfortable working from home.
"I like to be at home, so it worked well for me to get up quietly, have breakfast, sit quietly at the computer, work well with the children," says Maldonado, who recognized an increase in working from home considering that the hours Work hours were mixed with rest, and the work became personalized with each student, which increased their work schedule.
The meeting with the students
What at first they did not know how long it was going to last was lengthening until two years later.
The experience has been so hard that Sara said that there were very difficult moments during the pandemic in which she thought about resigning, after more than 40 years of teaching.
"In a few moments I did think about retiring because the truth is a very exhausting job, working virtual and face-to-face is exhausting. Then one said 'My God, enlighten me. What am I going to do? Am I retiring or continue?' So we already decided that We were going to finish the year 2021 to see what happens."
And both Sara and Patricia had an emotional return to class, because meeting their students face to face is priceless.
"Going back to the classroom gave us great joy to have to see the children again and be with them. But on the other hand, it was also anguish to think that a child was going to get infected, that something was going to happen to him," said Patricia, acknowledging the complexity of enforcing biosafety protocols.
It is 2022 and some students in Colombia are just returning to face-to-face classes, while a fourth wave of coronavirus haunts daily life, as some schools try to return to normality.
By January 17, 15% of the 7 million students in Colombia resumed face-to-face classes;
100% of the country's public school students are expected to fully return to classes by February, according to the Ministry of Education.
-- With information from Paula Bravo of CNN en Español.
Covid-19