Pat McShea

November 9, 2020 by wpengine

Teaching in a Pandemic

Full immersion in a different culture was the plan back in August 2019, when Rika Opio signed a yearlong contract to teach English in the port city of Busan, South Korea. The museum educator and Pittsburgh Public School substitute teacher could never have imagined that her adventure would include experiencing another nation’s response to a global pandemic.

Rika has been back in Pittsburgh since early September, engaging remotely with students at Sunnyside Elementary on a daily basis as part of her regular assignment to the Stanton Heights school. During a recent interview she offered striking examples of how, earlier this year, daily life in Busan differed from what we experienced in the Pittsburgh area.

photograph of bridge over a river with mountains in the background at sunset — Busan, South Korea

In response to the public health threat of COVID-19, South Korea went into lockdown at the end of February, with everyone strictly at home for two weeks. Schools, including the English language hagwon, or private academy, where Rika taught, remained closed through May. An enormous amount of effort was put into contract tracing. Anyone who had a Korean phone number would get the emergency alerts about those with confirmed cases. The alerts would say where that person lived and the places they may have been in contact with others. People who had direct contact with confirmed cases could get tested for free, and treated for free if they did have COVID. As Rika explains, “There were times when I would be awakened at night by my phone ringing with alerts for three minutes straight.”

Although Rika now recalls the weeks of lockdown and school closure as “a time when I tried to pick-up hobbies,” she summarized the nation-wide policies as “sensible rules that treated the pandemic as the serious threat it is.” Daily life began returning to normal in Busan by late spring. Rika’s English language hagwon operated at 50% capacity during its re-opening month, and attendance climbed steadily as the weeks passed.

Face mask wearing remained a key virus reduction strategy, and as Rika explains, “It was never a problem for students to wear masks. Korea has something of a culture of wearing masks to reduce disease transmission. The mindset is simply, you don’t want to infect other people.”

The teacher’s first hint that her life back in Pittsburgh would proceed under different circumstances occurred on her flight home. “On the International flight from Seoul to Dallas passengers sat in widely spaced seats, and everyone wore face masks. On the domestic flight from Dallas to Pittsburgh every seat was occupied, and most passengers didn’t wear masks.”

Patrick McShea works in the Education and Visitor Experience department of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Changing Seats in Changing Times

If only classroom seating changes were the biggest disruption facing teachers and students this fall. During a recent interview Ellen Sanin, Post-Secondary Coordinator for St. Anthony School Programs, mentioned the switch from group tables to tray tables as an example of a physical COVID-19 adjustment. Within the pair of classrooms at Duquesne University’s Fisher Hall that serve as her home base, the flexibility of individual seating allows for social distancing. Like every other teacher, the far bigger adjustment she’s currently dealing with involves the drastic reduction in enrichment opportunities for her students.

At eight locations in the Pittsburgh area, St. Anthony School Programs offer inclusive education for students age 5 -21 with primary diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down Syndrome, and Intellectual Disabilities. At the Duquesne University site where she has worked for the past five years, Ellen is responsible for teaching gym, technology skills, and job preparedness to 29 students between the ages of 18 and 21.

Although the disruptions she and her students faced in the wake of the mid-March lock down are hard to imagine, Ellen’s summary of the turbulent time is understated. “Like everyone else, we went to remote learning, but with a population with particular challenges to using the technology – some who can’t read, and some who are nonverbal.” This fall, in-person teaching has resumed, with instruction for three of her students restricted to on-line.

In former years, post-secondary students and instructors in the St. Anthony Program routinely visited as many as 20 different Pittsburgh sites as part of job preparedness training. Current COVID-19 restrictions, Ellen explained, have reduced these field trip destinations to a handful of locations on the Duquesne University campus, the Allegheny County Court House, and a life skills and home skills training apartment in Squirrel Hill. “We made regular visits to Carnegie Library locations, but libraries, like lots of other places are operating under new guidelines.”

Because Ellen in also a veteran museum educator, with deep experience teaching summer camp programs, the interview closed with a question about her insight into parallels between the students she works with on a daily basis and those she has taught during summer. “The main difference is age, of course, but the similarities in interests are remarkable. One of my current students is fascinated with dinosaurs. He would have loved being in a dinosaur class.”

Western Bird, Eastern Waters

If you enter Bird Hall from the Grand Staircase Balcony, the first taxidermy mount you’ll encounter is an American Avocet, an elegant species commonly associated with the shallow margins of western lakes. The life-like preserved remains of the 20-inch high, long-legged, and long-billed bird occupy the lower-right position within a display case visually dominated by a flamingo. “Adaptations for Feeding” is the comparative theme for the display’s six preserved birds, a select group the Avocet earned membership among by virtue of its long, reed-thin, and slightly up-turned bill.

The species, known to science as Recurvirostra Americana, feeds by swinging its bill scythe-like through the water to capture small invertebrates. Remarkably, on a recent evening, I was able to observe an Avocet demonstrate the technique in waters less than three miles from the museum.

American Avocet (lower left) downstream from boats moored at the South Side Marina. Credit: Amy Henrici.

On July 24, a local birder used an online forum to share a lunchtime sighting of an avocet in the shallow waters of Monongahela River near the Birmingham Bridge. The report enabled other birders to make quick plans for riverside visits, and by 7:00 p.m. I was among a handful of binocular-bearing observers who watched the bird for 30 minutes from a South Side path before it flew upstream and out of sight.

American Avocet in Monongahela waters. Credit: Amy Henrici.

In the following days I tried to retroactively enrich the firsthand observation. I read the American Avocet account on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s informative All About Birds website, re-read relevant passages in The Wind Birds, author Peter Matthiessen’s 1967 tribute to the diverse tribe of species collectively termed “shore birds,” and finally, made a narrowly-focused visit to Bird Hall.

Kneeling on the marble floor in front of the avocet, I was able to inspect a key physical feature that days earlier had been concealed by murky Monongahela waters – the species’ fully webbed feet. Studying anatomical details on taxidermy mounts can enhance field observations of wildlife. This statement can be something of a mantra for natural history museum educators.

Teaching in a Changed World

For several years Leslie Vandegrift has used materials from the Educator Loan Collection to enhance reading lessons for kindergarten through third grade students. As the librarian for West Hills Primary School in the Armstrong School District, she’s put authentic objects to use in building vocabulary, sparking curiosity about the ideas conveyed through ever longer strands of words and sentences, and promoting the reading of all kinds of books. In the library of West Hills Primary, materials from the museum illustrating topics ranging from nocturnal animals to the wildlife discoveries of the Lewis and Clark Expeditions have helped diminish the 44 highway miles separating the two buildings.

When reached by phone a dozen days before the start of in-person classes, the 24 year veteran educator expressed concern about how the school year would proceed and whether her library could function as it did in the past. As she summarized, “The most challenging part of this new normal, is that the students will be unable to check out books for at least the first semester of school. There is zero sharing of materials in our school building in order to keep our students as safe as possible. It’s disheartening to engage students in new topic areas and authors, but not be able to allow them to pursue it independently.” Student well-being was her utmost priority, and she expressed pride in knowing that was also the case for every one of her co-workers.

If the spread of COVID-19 pushes her school to on-line instruction, Leslie expressed confidence that the transition would be far smoother than what occurred across the country back in mid-March. Days of in-service training in August were devoted to mastering the intricacies and capabilities of a digital learning management platform called “Canvas,” and the first order of business after the opening day of school will be getting the students comfortable interacting with the electronic interface.

Leslie’s description of the learning platform’s flexibility leads me to remind more teachers about the Educator Loan Program’s continued importance as a resource. Materials can be borrowed to create digital products. Cell phone still images or brief videos of authentic objects can improve lessons presented on learning platforms. Your productions don’t have to meet the standards of the library displays at West Hill Primary School for learning to occur.

Armored Advantage

A folded hindwing of this lightning bug is visible beneath a raised forewing.

As adaptations go, the hardened forewings of beetles have a long track record of success. The paired structures, known as elytra (or singularly as elytron), don’t contribute significant aerodynamic advantage to beetle flight. Because they protect the delicate hindwings under all other circumstances, however, elytra help to ensure the capability of flight whenever it’s necessary.

Evidence for the survival advantages conveyed by the wing covers is impressive. The order Coleoptera, the scientific category of beetles, contains more than 380,000 named and described species, a figure that represents nearly a quarter of currently known animal species.

In Dinosaur Armor, the world premiere exhibition occupying the R. P. Simmons Family Gallery for the next 10 months, a colorful array of preserved beetles illustrates the insects’ built-in shield adaptation.

Visitors interested in elytra can visually study a far larger and more diverse beetle display just outside the Dinosaur Armor exit. Here hundreds of curated specimens from the scientific collection have been arranged in a wall-sized display.

Collectively and individually, this mass of pinned beetles serves to reinforce an unstated theme of Dinosaur Armor: functional exterior armor does not necessarily preclude natural beauty.

Mystery Spit

spittlebug froth on a leaf — Spittlebug froth on the stalk and leaf stem of a sneezeweed plant.

You’ve likely noticed the stuff at this time of year even if you didn’t have a ready name for it – grape-sized globs of frothy white foam on all kinds of plant stems.

The bubbles are made by the nymph stage of a large group of insects known commonly as frog hoppers, and scientifically as members of the widespread insect superfamily Cercopoidea.

Because the activity of the nymphs is so noticeable, they’ve earned their own common name – spittlebugs.

spittlebug on a leaf — A spittlebug temporarily removed from its frothy shelter.

The nymphs, which hatch in the spring from eggs laid the previous summer, are sap drinkers. They pierce plant stems to access the juices produced by the growing plant, drink deeply, and after processing vital nutrients, turn their waste stream into a protective shelter. Although spittlebug froth visually resembles spit, it contains no saliva. The bubbles are mixture of the tiny creature’s urine and a sticky fluid produced in an abdominal gland.

The frothy layer keeps the soft-bodied insects from drying out and it also serves as a predator barrier. Because spittlebugs produce urine in amounts more than 150 times their own body weight, their bubbly shelters generally offer ample protection.

Research about spittlebugs has been conducted at University of British Columbia. Information about this research, including a short video narrated by New York Times Science Writer James Gorman can be found at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/science/spittlebugs-bubble-home.html

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