My 5th Graders have Senioritis

Originally written in late May 2021.

I wake up and sit in front of the laptop, start the Zoom meeting at 8:30am, and watch them trickle in slowly. I say good morning to many who say nothing back. Cameras off. Microphones muted. Perhaps one will write “good morning” in the chat. I appreciate that. And of course there are a few who are up and at ‘em, ready to go, or don’t care that they’ve just rolled out of bed and their hair is a mess. The black squares don’t bother me anymore. I don’t think it’s right for a teacher to demand cameras be on, even if it hurts my soul to teach to what looks like nothingness. What I can’t take, though, is when there’s no response, no “reactions,” no chatting, no unmuting and speaking up. And as we creep ever closer to June 25th, the days are getting a lot quieter.

Any teacher will tell you that students and teachers alike experience burnout by the end of the school year. Of course, this year has been unlike any other. COVID closures robbed my school’s first graduating class of a trip to D.C., organized by our Parents’ Association, a real graduation, and the ability to say goodbye to their friends and teachers before heading off on summer vacation and potentially never seeing one another again.

Last year, we attributed the kids’ burnout mostly to the pandemic. We were all experiencing collective trauma unlike anything we ever had before. I had a panic attack the weekend before Mayor De Blasio closed the schools back in March of 2020, and most of those first few weeks online, I was simply trying to hold it together, taking deep, shaky breaths in front of my laptop, which was propped up on my tiny kitchen table, my chair backed into a corner against the spices, before starting the Zoom meeting. April was a frenzy of getting in touch with families who hadn’t connected yet to Google Classroom or Zoom, but in those early days, online learning was fun in the way that all new things are. The students were excited about being able to “do school” from home. The expectation was that we’d be closed until spring break, and then return afterward, so they saw it as a sort of 6-week vacation. We all know how that turned out. 

As the spring wore on, we saw our students’ withdrawal as a symptom of the trauma the pandemic was inflicting on us all. Slowly, more and more cameras turned off and we were left staring at black squares and teaching into the ether. Eventually we took any student contact with school as a win, counting them present, urging them to return to the next class, and to come back tomorrow too. My school set up weekly events to encourage participation and boost morale, and it worked for the most part. We were pleasantly surprised at our Zoom graduation ceremony to have 100% attendance, even from those who had never shown their faces on a Zoom call. 

The group I’m teaching now has been fully remote since September, not counting the three months of last school year. They started the year with cameras on, smiling, joking, eager to learn and connect again with one another. In September, if I put on a dance video, they’d all stand up and get silly with me.

Now, I never know what to expect. Will they arrive with energy and laughter, willing to take on the day, leaving me ever impressed by their resilience and maturity? Or will they arrive late, stay muted and unresponsive as I call their names, their Classkick and Google Slides pages empty? 

It’s still burnout, but different than last year’s case; my co-teachers and I are calling it senioritis. That’s really the only way we’ve been able to describe the atmosphere in our classes to our colleagues. In staff meetings, we wait our turn to share out and find ourselves leading with disclaimers: “So in fifth we’re dealing with a lot of resistance to work. Just keep that in mind as we share this…” Asynchronous work? Maybe 12 out of 39 students will do it. We scrapped that long ago. Everything we do is synchronous. Are you here now? Okay, let’s get to work then. Class is over? Go enjoy your free time. 

Miriam Webster defines senioritis as a noun meaning “an ebbing of motivation and effort by school seniors as evidenced by tardiness, absences, and lower grades.” If you type the word into Google’s search engine, their English dictionary will specify that senioritis is a “supposed affliction of students in their final year of high school or college.” Fifth graders shouldn’t be affected by it, but I can assure you that ours are.

Perhaps it’s the knowledge that in a few months, they’ll be on summer break, going to a new school in the fall. Maybe it’s the hormones, some of them starting to have real crushes, and wanting to spend as much time socializing as possible. It could also be a defense mechanism: tamping down the hope they’d had for a “normal year.” Whatever the cause, fifth grade senioritis starts like a true virus, first infecting just a few, even the most prepared, and then spreading rapidly until you’re all consumed and trying to remedy it by any means necessary.

The coupling of senioritis with this second year of remote learning is extreme, and difficult. The parents feel it too. Just last week I received messages from a couple of them, echoing one another: “I just can’t anymore. I don’t know what to do with them.” 

Fifth grade is supposed to be the magic year—in children’s literature, it’s the eleven-year-old protagonist who makes that leap from childhood to adulthood. I urge my students to turn on their cameras so I can feel their presence, imagining that for them, remote learning would be much more enjoyable if they were able to feel that sense of community too. But what about socializing in this 2-D world is normal? How are they supposed to test their voices, react spontaneously, show off their newfound autonomy, when only one microphone can be unmuted at a time? 

Right now, our students are writing letters to their representative about water issues in their community, like the presence of lead in school plumbing systems, and the pollution of the Bronx River, which runs behind our school. They’re as engaged as they can be. But they’ll be done with the letters in a couple of weeks, and what then? We’ll still have four more weeks. Four more weeks of black squares, talking to myself, and hoping they engage.

Maybe we need to fully flip the script. We’ve already switched around our schedule, starting with an extended morning meeting to ease into the day, and it’s shown a lot of promise. Perhaps we can cure this bout of senioritis by putting the power into their hands for the end of the year: what do you want to learn about? And how do you want to learn it? Our year-long essential question is “How can you use your voice to create change in your world?” We’ll let students lead the way. We’ll step back, give them and ourselves some grace, and see what happens. Come the morning, when I start the 8:30am meeting, I hope they’ll be waiting, ready to share with excitement what they’ve come up with.