Listen to teacher Dwayne C. Cobham — a first-generation Panamanian American born in Brooklyn, New York — talk about teaching ST.E.A.M. remotely to special needs students during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. In 2020 he was a head science teacher and he met on Zoom with his Teaching Assistant and teachers in his school. He often spent his lunch break on Zoom with students and with their parents in the background. He describes how on Zoom some students played with the mute-button and bombed the chat with gibberish and tilted their cameras up to the ceiling in defiance of keeping their cameras on. In 2021 he worked in-person at another school and his workdays started at 5pm and ended at 9pm. He began teaching all of the subjects — English, math, social studies, science, and engineering to students with special needs — because the school wanted to keep the students in their homerooms to prevent the spread of the virus. In 2022 Dwayne talks about the ending of the mask-mandate in New York City and how the students had fun making funny faces, because they could finally see each other’s full faces.
Dwayne shares about sadly losing a cousin — Rick/Ricky/Ricardo — who may have died from Covid-19 in February of 2020, before everyone was aware of it, and whose funeral both of our families attended in-person before we aware of Covid-19’s presence in the States.
Here’s a link to the Instagram post of me and Dwayne and his brother and his mom and my sister and our mom.
Here’s a link to the funeral program with Rick/Ricky/Ricardo’s photo on the cover.
