On Confronting Fear with Learning

When I was in elementary school, the “Bloody Mary” urban legend was going strong in my school, and I was legitimately terrified. I was having nightmares and pretty sure that a vengeful ghost was going to crawl out of my mirror in the night and kill me in my bed. I can chuckle about it now, but as a ten-year-old, it had a big impact on me.

My mother, who is far and away one of the wisest people I have ever known, listened to me with nurturing care and then took me to a place that I still associate with relief and great solace: the library. Because that iteration of the legend linked this apparition to Mary, Queen of Scots, we checked out books about her and took them home to read. It demystified things for me and helped me to put my fears to rest.

Later, in my adolescence, The Night Stalker brought his reign of terror to Southern California, and killed someone in my home town. Naturally, our whole community was terrified, and everyone was consumed with the quest to keep themselves and their families safe. Because I had learned to confront fear with learning, I studied the case and others like it, and this became the foundation of my academic interest in forensic science.

We are now in a time where our communities are again gripped by fear, and this fear has inevitably found its way into our classrooms, impacting not only our students but their families, our teachers, and our leadership. Many of us are also caught in the confusion of trying to figure out how to continue providing quality education to our students when we cannot share physical space with them. The challenges we face right now are intimidating, to put it mildly.

Given the experiences of my formative years, it’s probably not surprising that I also see this as an opportunity. Under quarantine myself, I admit that I am terrified of what the coming months will bring, but I know that the best antidote I have for fear is learning, so I wanted to share some ideas that have come to mind for turning this crisis into project-based learning for our students.

ELA Ideas

• In A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe chronicled the outbreak of the bubonic plague in London of 1665. While this may not be a suitable reading for younger students, it could be a great project to have them record their experiences of this unprecedented time in our history. This may also encourage them to process their feelings about everything that is happening around them. As a bonus, students can work on this project without an internet connection or even a computer.
• Story telling can be a great release for people who are under stress. You could encourage your students to write their own fictional stories to help cheer themselves and their fellow students, and they can write these stories even when an internet connection is unavailable and share them via email when it is. If you have access to a virtual classroom or web meetings of some kind, you can even have a virtual “camp fire” where students share their stories with one another to help them feel connected to you and to their classmates. I’d recommend allowing students to submit their stories via text if they suffer from social anxiety or struggle to speak in class for any reason. The idea is to comfort the students, not to put them in another anxiety-inducing situation.

Math Ideas

• Invite students to pick a kind of data that relates to the Coronavirus that they can track over the next few weeks, or until your classes meet again. It could be the number of cases that are being reported, but it could also be recording information from people who have recovered regarding their experiences, the number of people volunteering to help people under quarantine, the institutions who are closing to protect the health of people in their communities, the new technologies and systems being developed to help connect people under social isolation, or other details less likely to increase their fear of the illness itself. When you’re able to share space with your students again (whether online or physical), you can guide them through using their data to create charts and graphs, or to understand what the data mean and how it helps us prepare for future crises.

Science Ideas

• The ideas here are virtually endless, and you can give your students the option to pick something that interests them:
  • How are the virus tests being developed to help test more people and allow medical institutions to help control the disease?
  • What are scientists learning about the virus and how it spreads and impacts infected people?
  • How does social isolation help to control the spread of the virus?
  • What methods can we take to help stop the spread of the virus as individuals?
  • How does soap remove the virus from our hands even though it doesn’t “kill” it?
  • How has our learning from past epidemics helped us to prepare for this one (and how might what we learn now protect us even better in the future)?
  • How does the availability of tests and the volume of testing we perform help us to control the spread of the virus?

Technology Ideas

• How does technology help to support social isolation plans in schools, government, and private companies? How do these technologies help us when we’re not pursuing social isolation, and how can we ensure that these technologies help us to increase access to people with disabilities in the future?
• What technologies are being used within the medical field to help patients, and how do these technologies impact the survival rate of patients?
• Compare the current technology landscape to the technology landscape from 30 years ago. What do you think social isolation would have meant then?
• How does social and economic inequality impact who is able to stay connected and keep learning and who is not? How can we address these inequalities so that future crises don’t exclude some people from school and other opportunities?

Civics and History Ideas

• This is an unprecedented event in modern history. Compare our current crisis with another epidemic from history. In what ways are we better off now, and in what ways are we at a disadvantage?
• The epidemic and our political response to it are deeply entwined. In what ways is our political culture impacting our response to the epidemic, and how is the epidemic impacting our political culture?
• Compare and contrast the epidemic responses and plans in other countries with the response in the United States.
• How can government either help or hinder the scientific and medical responses to epidemics?

I will keep adding ideas as I think of them, but please feel free to share yours in the comments below! We’ll all be better off if we help support one another, and I look forward to collaborating with anyone who finds their way here!