Second-year Alta Loma Middle School teacher Scott Amiton was working at the American School of Bombay in Mumbai, India, when the COVID-19 pandemic first began in 2020.
Originally from Oregon, Amiton has spent much of his career since 2005 teaching overseas in international schools located in Thailand, India, China, and other places.
When the world began shutting down in the winter and early spring of 2020, he was evacuated from India and wound up teaching students from the American School of Bombay remotely through the end of June.
After that, he relocated to the Bay Area, joining South San Francisco Unified School District (SSFUSD) in time for the beginning of the 2020-21 school year.
That year, SSFUSD made the decision to keep middle schoolers and high schoolers in distance learning for the entire school year. Amiton reflects back on the year of distance learning and talks about what it’s like at Alta Loma now that students have returned to classrooms for the 2021-22 school year.
SSFUSD: What do you think the impact of distance learning was on students?
SA: It’s a little bit more difficult to evaluate the impact on the kids themselves and how positive it was. I’d like to think that it was at least as good as in-person, but, that said. . .we’re in middle school, and I think we have to remember that we’re dealing with 11- and 12-year-olds, and there’s a huge variation in the maturity and responsibility level of kids at that age.
Some of the kids are very responsible, and they roll with the punches, and they know that even when the teacher’s not there, or their parents are at work, that they need to be doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and they all know what they’re supposed to be doing, but it’s whether they then have the motivation to do it, and there are some kids that do and some kids that don’t.
I think the kids that do—they’re adapting better, and they’re getting as much out of school as it is as they can, and they are very positive, and I think they’re understanding, and then there are other kids—I guess—who are more used to being supervised all the time, and when they lose that supervision, then it’s like, “WHOO-HOO!”
SSFUSD: Did being a new teacher at the school make any sort of difference?
SA: The seventh graders I have this year were online for sixth grade, so none of them had been to middle school, so middle school was new for all of them, so I think the fact that I was a new teacher at Alta Loma didn’t really register with them. . .and I believe that they sort of accepted me as part of the structure of the school, so I could have been here forever.
SSFUSD: What’s it like now that student have returned to campus for the 2021-22 school year?
SA: I certainly enjoy being with the kids. Maybe the drawbacks are that they missed a lot of that socialization piece from their seventh [sixth] grade year, and I think all the teachers are noticing that this year that the kids coming in—the maturity level is lower than what we would expect, and that leads to more behavior problems and a little more silly behavior. That’s something we’re all working on, I think.
I think we have to remember that some of these kids were out for part of the year before also, so the sixth graders that I had really were—kind of—midway through fifth grade—I think the last time they’ve really been in class—and we’re seeing that still now this year, because the kids I’m getting back hadn’t really been in school since elementary school, and it’s a big transition from fifth grade to middle school.
SSFUSD: What impact have the COVID-19 variants had on students this year?
SA: The variant and—sort of—this reoccurrence of this—kind of—partial response. . .we’ll see what happens. I mean, it’s kind of unfortunate, because now this same group of kids across the spectrum—the ones who missed and maybe weren’t able to get as much out of online learning last year—now they have this big disruption in their second year of learning, so it’s hard, but everybody’s doing their best to adapt, and now more and more kids are starting to come back.
SSFUSD: How have you managed to create a sense of community through all this?
SA: The beginning of the year and the end of the year are always interesting times. They’re a little less structured. The kids are coming in. You’re not really doing content in your subject area yet. You’re just kind of meeting the kids and getting to know them, so those are fun times when you can be a little bit less structured and get to know the kids, and that’s how we did it this year—a lot of time with getting to know you activities.