I am so pleased to turn over today's Quad blog to Margaret Pulte, a GEAR UP all-star, with CFES Brilliant Pathways GEAR UP. 

Margaret, take it away!

A few weeks ago, sometime in early March, I helped with the 6th and 7th grade Science Fair. The Science Fair is a big deal at my school, and as a result, students were full of excitement and stress about this year’s virtual presentations. As the night wound down, students walked to the cafeteria to eat pizza and hear about the night’s successes. I sat in the back of the room eating my slice, and as I was about to enjoy my last bite, a teacher walked up to me and exclaimed “so that’s what you look like!” At that point, we had been working together for 7 months, and actually, her classroom is right next to mine. That pizza dinner was the first time she saw me smile. 

 This past August, I was hired to work on CFES Brilliant Pathways’ GEAR UP grant, which supports 7 schools in the Adirondack Park in Upstate New York.  We are in our third year of the grant, and as a result, our coordinators are working hard to make some noticeable progress. However, one of the biggest challenges to our success is the way that the COVID-19 pandemic has and continues to separate us from our school communities. I am lucky enough to work exclusively at one school, and this year, most of the elementary school has been in-person while the middle and high schools have followed a hybrid schedule. This means that I have been fortunate enough to share classroom space with teachers and students. However, even with this “face-time,” most of them have not seen me up close or without a mask. If I’m lucky, I’ve caught a glimpse of their face during lunch, but mostly, I have not seen the smiles of the students and teachers that I work with and support every day. 

 While it might seem tiresome to focus on the same thing that everyone has been talking about for the past year (the pandemic) or strange to focus on my ability or lack thereof to see the bottom half of a person’s face, it’s representative of a larger desire to connect with my community at my school. I haven’t had coffee with teachers in the teachers’ lounge, and I haven’t comforted a student on a bad day. We’ve kept six feet of distance between us, and this distance is really what inspired our newest coordinator run event—Fireside Chats with the Fellows. 

 Fireside Chats happen monthly, and in a nutshell, they are 30-minute, live-streamed, casual conversations with and between CFES GEAR UP Coordinators. Several of us live together, so we can cozy up beside the fireplace in our office and hold the informal conversations that we cannot easily have in our schools with other educators and students. While the Fireside Chats are not perfect, they are our way of inviting educators and students to connect with us and to grow with us through this connection.

 Our Fireside Chats have covered topics such as The College Application Process, Tips for Virtual Learning, and Social Justice in Education Spaces. Really, we talk about anything and everything that we want to talk about, and we use our own stories and lives to share information and to hold the conversations that we wish we could be having at school. As a result, every time I interact with a Fireside Chat, whether I’m featured in it or an audience member, I feel like I’ve been given the now-rare opportunity to casually sit with and learn from other educators. I am beyond grateful for these moments. 

When I was initially invited to write this blog, I was asked to write about the challenges that the Coordinators in my network face. In many ways, we face the same challenges that all coordinators face—virtual burnout, low school attendance in the virtual age, and separation from students, their families, and other educators. Recently, I have even been feeling a little burned out on the Fireside Chats. I think that as more schools go back to in-person instruction and the world opens up a bit, the virtual connection offered by the Fireside Chat is no longer cutting it. My burnout might also be due simply to the ebbs and flows of pandemic life. So as my life ebbs and flows and I address the burnout I am feeling for an event I once loved, I am going to instruct myself (and all of you, if you are at all feeling this way) to return to the core of the Fireside Chat: Take 30 minutes, sit down with a friend, and talk about what you want to talk about. It is freeing and wonderful and can teach you so much.

Margaret Pulte

Fellow GEAR UP, Moriah Central School District