This week on Minnesota Native News. educators tell us in their own words how they and their students are dealing with distance learning.
Transcript
This week on Minnesota native news. Educators tell us in their own words how they and their students are dealing with distance learning. I'm Marie Rock.
Cindy Ward Thompson Makyapi. My name is Cindy Ward Thompson. I work at the Bdote Learning Center. I'm the director there have been there for five years. But okay Learning Center is a kindergarten through eighth grade Dakota and a Ojibwe immersion school. We are a charter school. We are located in South Minneapolis. We had to move immersion education online. If you asked me a month ago, what it would take to get us to move our programming online I would say a million dollars in a couple of years. We did it in a few weeks without the million dollars or anything else. Just amazing. I work with the best team of people that you can find anywhere and they're working their butts off.
We are very lucky in that first of all, we are small, we only have about 110 students because we are kind of embedded within the community. It was pretty easy to reach out to our kids, we call them up and we had somebody drive the device over to their house. The nice thing is, is that we have a good variety of different ages. We have elders, and we have young people working and they've kind of helped each other to to get things going. We have a lot of other community organizations that we partner with that have been really helpful. Mr. WRC division of Indian work, everybody that we reach out to seems to lend help in one way or another. I think some of our families are scared, they're scared, they're going to lose somebody that they love. They're scared they're going to have something big change. We've had a lot of kids with some issues with anxiety or safety and being able to provide some help for them has been really important for us.
Veronica Peterson Briggs, Bdote Learning Center.
Well, I have a clumping of first, second and third graders in one classroom. And then I teach them reading in Ojibwe. So it's like, what should we literacy, teach them math in Ojibwe? Then we do science and we do history or geography, social studies stuff, as well. You know, a lot of what we're doing is creating new things, different perspectives for the kids to learn in different ways because it's experiential learning. That's how we are as a school. And so I look at this process of being online learning or distance learning is a new way for me to learn as a teacher. My whole purpose for them right now is to still be present. writing their language. And as much as possible, a little bit of their culture that they would get on any given day. I like to tell my, my children at home, that there's a time for you to be a student, and there's a time for you to be a kid. And if you get your work done, you know, it's kind of like a reward system, but it's also how we are as adults, we have to build them up so that they can, you know, kind of be in charge of themselves. But you know, we're also there to guide them.
3:34
I'm Tim Brown. I'm the principal at the American Indian Magnet School in St. Paul, the message this first few weeks with my staff, but just let's try to make some connections, and let the kids and families know that we're there and we miss them and just build that connection piece. That's the biggest thing first. You know, we've taken everything away so the kids miss the teachers, the teachers miss the kids, and kids miss each other. So we're all trying to do this thing in a vacuum right now. No, with just focusing on content, but it's what we got to do right now to get through it. Just kind of I'll be done with a lump in our throat, because it's just not quite what schools are. So I'm trying to caution and coach my staff that you know, everyone's a different spot, and that's okay. And don't push your press right now, it's not like business as usual. You can't be hounding parents to do certain things they're trying to get through the day right now. So wherever they are, it's just fine. I guess, realizing that when all is said and done, it's still really the relationships that kind of are the most important thing. And that's the same now as when we're in schools. It's just different now.
Marie Rock: Thanks to Cindy Ward Thompson, Veronica Peterson, Briggs and Tim Brown for sharing their stories. Minnesota native news is produced by hampers diverse radio for Minnesota communities made possible by funding from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.