By Alfredo Gonzalez 

With our return to in-person learning after a year online, teachers and students have been forced to adapt to the new hybrid learning structure.

I was able to interview Ms. Scarpelli, an Algebra 2 and Algebra 2 business teacher on campus. She gave her insight on the courses, which were shortened to two in-person days a week.

According to Ms. Scarpelli, because of the new hybrid schedule, many teachers had to either cut topics out of their course or speed up the teaching process. The math department looked over the curriculum to see what concepts are essential for students’ futures and which ones they can skip. They based what’s most important by using the college readiness exams and hypothesizing what concepts they may need in everyday life. 

Many teachers had to adapt to a new teaching style and rely on websites to gather information about each students’ learning process.

Before COVID, Ms. Scarpelli would walk around the classroom and look over her students’ work to make sure that they understood the problems, but now, she has to rely on her students asking questions and their work on the site Go Formative. 

Go Formative is a website that can be used for various subjects. It shows the students and teachers what problems they got wrong. The teacher can then leave a comment on the students’ errors telling them what they did wrong and how to fix it.

With Hybrid learning now being in full effect, Ms. Scarpelli shares “It doesn’t feel normal, although I’m glad to finally see students work again and provide my students with immediate feedback on that work.”

The teachers also have the option to host Zoom calls. Ms. Scarpelli did both Zoom and in-person teaching but “It tied [her] to the computer so the students who were at home could also get the help that they needed. [She] didn’t feel like [she] was providing proper support to either group of students.”

Since then, she has scrapped this way of teaching and opted for only in-person classes and assigned work on asynchronous days. She found teaching through Zoom and in-person difficult for students to learn and felt she could not offer the proper help for any of her students. 

However hard it is to teach in the new hybrid schedule, Ms. Scarpelli loves being back on campus and enjoys having the ability to build a stronger bond with her students.