This school year has been a new experience for teachers as they teach in-person students and virtual students simultaneously.

With students being in school, it’s much easier to communicate face to face, but with online students, there isn’t a completely open line of communication.

“Students do not always check their Canvas or Gmail messages, and they sometimes even block Remind messages,” math teacher Rachel Bevan said. “So it is very hard to find contact information for some students.”

Teachers are split on whether all students should be going to school in one way or if it was the right decision to let students choose how they went about this school year.

“It makes things challenging sometimes,” English teacher Denise Fuller said. “But I want the students to feel good about their choice to stay at home.”

Teachers are also feeling the effects of trying to stay on track with late work and making sure their online students are doing their work themselves.

“Most of my students are good about turning their work in,” math teacher Holly Andrews said. “What is more stressful to me is how to make sure that all of my students actually did their work themselves and not with help or a website that would do the work for them.”

Being split between home and school could make the academic differences seem extreme with the new workload, but teachers have made it clear that the grades aren’t all that much different or even better than before.

“For students who are actually in attendance or signed onto the google meets, I feel like this year is actually better academically.” social studies teacher Calvin Wright said. “I’ve had more kids passing out of those students than I did last year.”

With such a large separation of students between virtual learning and in-person learning, it would be expected for teachers to feel overwhelmed with the new system and want everything to go back to normal.

“This past week we were able to enjoy peppy passing periods. I said, “Wow, this is the most normal thing I have heard this year!”,” family and consumer science teacher Natasha Deramee said. “One day, it will get back to normal and that will be a very happy day!”