Four years ago this month, one of the most devastating wildfires in Oregon’s history erupted across the southern portion of the state.

As the COVID pandemic raged, leaving children out of schools and away from regular routines and social interactions, the fire only magnified the disruption. It destroyed thousands of homes in the agricultural towns that make up the Phoenix-Talent School District, displacing hundreds of families and closing as many businesses.

The wildfire, as with any natural disaster, had many ripple effects throughout the region. One that the district is still grappling with is the impact on young children. For the last few years, children have been entering kindergarten without some of the basic skills and abilities that had once been commonplace.

“It’s hard to separate the fire and pandemic,” says Tiffanie Lambert, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning at Phoenix-Talent School District. “The fire really exaggerated the learning losses and learning gaps of the pandemic. It made them even more visible, and it made them last longer.”

During the pandemic, many early learning programs and preschools — already a scarce resource in the area, Lambert says — shuttered temporarily. Then the fire, which damaged some early learning facilities, forced further closures. The two events prevented many children from accessing high-quality, in-person early care and education opportunities before kindergarten.

Plus, Lambert says, some of their families lost work, hurting them economically. Many of their parents were experiencing mental health challenges. Their households were filled with stress.

The combination of all of these factors helps explain the state of the district’s recent cohorts of incoming kindergarteners, she says. Many have lacked the social skills to interact with their peers, the ability to follow instructions and stick to a routine, the attention spans to sit through an entire story read aloud in class, Lambert says. Few had early learning experiences prior to starting school, she adds, and even concepts like which direction to turn the pages in a book are foreign to many of them.

Phoenix-Talent may be a more dramatic example, given the added impacts of the wildfire in 2020, but it is far from an anomaly. Across the country, elementary school teachers and leaders report that children are entering kindergarten worse off than their peers of the past. They have underdeveloped social-emotional and fine motor skills. Some are not yet able to use the restroom independently.

“The news is sobering,” says Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, an assessment company that recently published research showing that the nation’s youngest learners, especially, are still struggling to rebound from the pandemic’s disruption to learning and development. “The impact of the pandemic is lasting way longer than we anticipated.”

The differences are hard to miss. More children are having trouble separating from their parents or caregivers when they go to school, for example, because maybe they haven’t had much or any time apart from them until now.

“We see a lot of concern from parents and from teachers,” says Rachel Robertson, chief academic officer at Bright Horizons, which operates more than 600 early care and education centers in the U.S.

Many educators and researchers, in interviews, point out that these developmental differences may not all be a result of the pandemic and the lower rates of preschool enrollment that followed it. Children’s reliance on screens, including very young children — even infants and toddlers — is likely a factor.

Robertson believes screens are responsible for much of the disruption to fine motor development. Rather than reading physical books, some children are having stories read aloud to them from a phone. Rather than doing arts and craft activities, which give them a chance to practice holding a crayon or using scissors, they’re swiping on tablets.

“We’re having consequences of screens that we didn’t predict,” Robertson notes.

The good news is that even if children are “behind,” that can easily — and sometimes quickly — change. They pick up skills fast at such a young age, especially when learning is steeped in curiosity and wonder, Robertson says.

Children need certain skills and competencies to be ready to show up, participate and thrive in kindergarten, educators and child development experts say. But many kids — and an increasing number over the last four years — lack access to the resources and experiences that introduce those skills to them before they start elementary school. Noting this worrying downward trend, many school districts have stepped in with their own solutions to support early learners as they prepare to start school. We take a close look at two of them.

Oregon’s Jump Start Kindergarten

During the pandemic, leaders at the Oregon Department of Education understood that early learning programs were critical for preparing children to transition to kindergarten and that those programs were much less accessible and available to families at the time, creating a “critical need,” says Marc Siegel, communications director for the state’s department of education, in a written response to EdSurge.

Leaders “understood that additional support was necessary to ensure our youngest learners were prepared for the social, emotional and academic demands of public school environments after a prolonged period without in-person learning opportunities,” he adds.

Those sentiments led to the creation of Jump Start Kindergarten, a state-funded program that utilizes Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds from the federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act to provide incoming kindergartners and their families with an “on-ramp” to kindergarten.

The Jump Start program varies based on the needs of each school and community where it’s implemented, Siegel says, but all include a few key components. Every Jump Start program has a half-day classroom experience for at least two weeks, for a minimum of 30 hours total, characterized by hands-on activities, establishing classroom routines, and building relationships with other children and educators. Additionally, each program offers partnerships with community-based organizations and provides experiences to promote family engagement, such as playground meet-and-greets, a school-based scavenger hunt or an opportunity to meet school staff.

Phoenix-Talent School District has offered the Jump Start Kindergarten program during the last three summers, with noticeable results, Lambert says. It has also expanded the program in a few ways.

The first year — summer 2022 — the district’s program prioritized children with special needs who had limited access to early special education services. During those few weeks, they learned to follow a routine, to line up as a class, to use a paper towel dispenser, Lambert recalls.

In the second and third year, the district expanded the program by opening it up to any child who didn’t attend preschool or another early learning program and increased the duration to five or six weeks. This summer, the program enrolled 34 kids. (Phoenix-Talent was estimating 140 kindergarteners this fall, and Lambert says 50 or 60 slots would’ve been ideal.)

The children who attended Jump Start Kindergarten seem to be “much more prepared” and more committed to showing up to school each day, Lambert shares. “We saw a big difference in attendance. That impacts academics, too. Students don’t learn if they’re not at school.”

Overall, kindergarteners in the district had an attendance rate of 59 percent in the 2023-24 school year, whereas the students that had attended Jump Start the prior summer came 78 percent of the time. (It’s too early to collect data for the 2024-25 school year.)

The Jump Start program has been a boon at Phoenix-Talent, especially now that staff have figured out how best to run it. Its future, however, hangs in the balance, with ESSER funding expiring at the end of this month and replacement funding from the state uncertain.

“We’re pretty sad about it,” Lambert says. “It helps kids — and their parents — be more comfortable starting school. … I think we’re going to need that for many, many years.”

Baby Bags, Badging and Beyond

Without a designated program from the state, other districts have had to be a bit more scrappy.

Leaders in Manheim Central School District, in Manheim, Pennsylvania, realized that the pandemic would impact even the children not yet in school, and that they would need extra support.

“We knew we had to do things differently,” says Tracy Fasick, the recently retired director of curriculum and instruction for the small, rural district.

They came up with a multi-pronged strategy that would engage families early — as early as possible, in fact — and would create better communication and consistency with local early learning programs.

One of those strategies was “baby bags.” When a baby was born in the district — somewhere on the order of 210 to 240 times per year, Fasick says — she would drop off a bag that included resources on local programs and early intervention services, some toys and learning materials, and a sippy cup and bib with the district’s mascot.

“Right away, it establishes that this is a future child who will come to our school,” Fasick says of the bags. “It’s welcoming.”

In the district’s kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms, teachers use “badging,” where kids don’t get letter grades but badges for different skills and competencies they’ve mastered. For example, in those early elementary grades, a child can earn a badge if they achieve certain literacy and numeracy goals.

Fasick wanted to get the district’s future students more accustomed to that system, so she met with all of the preschool leaders in the area and helped them develop age- and developmentally-appropriate badges for the preschoolers, working backwards from the badges available for kindergarteners. Now, those programs offer badging, too. Kids can earn them for gross motor skills — if they can hop and skip — and for zipping or buttoning their own coats, for sitting still and following directions.

The preschool programs now, Fasick says, “are very aware of what we’re teaching in kindergarten, so they can prepare [the children] for what is going to be happening in kindergarten.”

She adds: “Kids like the badging. It’s something tangible. … Learning is celebrated, which helps a lot.”

As a final push in the lead-up to kindergarten, Manheim Central provides families with “Countdown to Kindergarten” boxes at their kindergarten registration.

Aimee Ketchum, a pediatric occupational therapist and professor of early childhood development at the nearby Cedar Crest College, created the boxes to give families a crash course in everything their child would be expected to know by the time they start kindergarten.

Ideally, the kids have six months to work through all the activities in their box, which includes a planner (detailing two activities to do each month), a pencil box with fine motor manipulatives, seed packets for planting, a ruler to measure the growth of those seeds and eventual flowers, activities and scissors for developing cutting skills, note cards to practice writing their names and an index card and string with which to practice tying a shoe.

Ketchum, who assembles the boxes in her garage with her family, clarifies that they are not intended to replace more formal early learning experiences, but rather to supplement it for those who don’t have access.

“Children need access to high-quality early childhood education, and too many of them aren’t getting it,” she says. “This is an attempt to provide some tools [and] some hands-on activities, and give parents an awareness of what is expected and an opportunity to practice” those skills with their children.

Pretty much every parent and caregiver wants the best for their child, Fasick notes, but many don’t know where to begin. The boxes offer guidance.

“Families are grateful for anything they can get that will help their kid,” Fasick says. “This is an easy way to help them.”

Het bericht Gecombineerde NIVEL- en CBS-gegevens COVID-19-pandemie zijn prima te verklaren! verscheen eerst op DutchCowboys.

Around this time four years ago, a seismic event was rippling across education.

In April 2020, teachers were beginning to realize that their schools’ closures would not be all that temporary. They’d need to make do with haphazard plans for distance learning through the end of the school year — perhaps longer.

For most educators, the pandemic was a defining moment in their careers, a situation more disruptive than they could’ve imagined.

For first-year teachers, it was baptism by fire.

In summer 2020, EdSurge profiled nine first-year teachers to understand what it was like for them to launch their careers during the pandemic year (2019-20).

Now, all of them are (or would be) in their fifth year in the classroom — a year by which about 44 percent of educators have left the profession. We checked in with them this month to see how they’re doing, what they’re up to and where they are now.

Six of the original nine responded to our queries. Of those six, one left teaching during her third year, and another will resign next month, at the end of the school year. The other four are still teaching and plan to continue.

EdSurge asked them to share about the challenges, rewards and lessons from their first five years — and, if they left, to elaborate on what drove them out. Their written responses are below, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Read the original story, from August 2020, here. Or listen to some of the teachers reflect on their first year during an episode of the EdSurge Podcast.

Lauren Bayersdorfer

Age: 28
Location: East Rutherford, New Jersey
Status: Still teaching
Starting salary: ~$65,000
Current salary: ~$70,000

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

I spent the first 3.5 years of my career at Weehawken High School, where I taught Algebra I (students in grades seven to nine) and AP Calculus (grades 11-12). For the past 1.5 years, I have been teaching Algebra I and geometry for grades nine and 10 at Becton Regional High School.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

The most challenging part has definitely been trying to keep students engaged in the classroom and interested in their learning. It's hard to teach math, period. But to compete with TikTok, social media and talking to their friends makes it that much more difficult.

The most rewarding part has been to get to know the kids on a more personal level, whether by incorporating occasional community-building activities in the classroom, or through the privilege of being their coach outside of the classroom. In addition, being able to learn from — and form friendships with — colleagues has been rewarding.

What has been the most surprising part of your teaching experience so far?

Just simply how difficult and demanding the job is. I normally walk more than 10,000 steps during school hours and am always exhausted by the end of the school day. Sometimes I just need a few minutes in my car to decompress before I run errands, go home and do more work. You always try to tell yourself, “It's only a job,” and not work outside of contract hours, but teaching is so much more than a job. It's a passion.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

It showed me how, before any of the items in the job description and responsibilities [related to] teaching them math, that my No. 1 goal is to build relationships with students. You never know what any student is tackling. Coming to your class or seeing you in the hallway might be the highlight of their day!

Jamie Wong Baesa

Age: 28
Location: Lorena, Texas
Status: Still teaching, but leaving at the end of this school year
Starting salary: ~$40,000
Current salary: ~$48,000

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

I have been in the same school (and same classroom!) since I first started. However, my roles and responsibilities have shifted. I started out teaching seventh grade math and did that for three years. Being in a small school, they needed help taking on extra elective sections, so I also started teaching eighth grade art in my fourth year. Finally, this year, I’ve added sixth grade math, so now I have a hand in all three grade levels at our middle school.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

The most challenging part of my job has been “all the other stuff” that comes with teaching. I teach math and art, but I also teach kids how to disagree in a healthy way, how to handle stress, how to communicate effectively, how to read and write, how to engage in the world we live in and how to manage social media. No one tells you that when you become a teacher, your role encompasses so much. We are with these students for eight hours every day, and the influence and opportunity we have is incredible, but also really hard, especially coming out of the pandemic. We aren’t trained to be professional counselors, but a lot of times this role (and many others) are thrust upon us because we are available and we care. I think this is also what leads to teacher burnout. We do so much more than our job descriptions and do not necessarily get the compensation or training we need to do it all.

The most rewarding part of my job has always been relationships — with students and with coworkers. Teaching is 100 percent a people profession, and it has been a joy to interact daily with so many wonderful humans, to see each individual grow and change and go through different life stages — good and bad. To have a tight-knit community like this has been very impactful for me.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

In my five years, I had a hard time figuring out what “normal” was supposed to be in teaching. From a year cut short by COVID-19, to a hybrid year, to a year where we pretended nothing had happened — every year was a rollercoaster and vastly different from the previous one.

On the bright side, my teaching approach became one of adaptability and resilience. I had to constantly ask myself: What really matters? Is it that the student can tell me what lateral surface area is, or is it that a student who has a family member with autoimmune disease feels safe at school every day? It was not always such a dramatic dichotomy, but I think many can relate to this idea of survival. We taught what we could, we emphasized the content and skills that would last, but we also just made sure everyone was safe, healthy and getting what they individually needed. This shifted my perspective and helped me remember that, just as we try to individualize instruction, we also remember that every student (and teacher) is going through something different and needs both grace and accountability.

I think teaching these past five years has made me more empathetic and reminded me that isolated classrooms [existing] in a school bubble aren’t realistic. The students I see daily are responding to society and the events in our world and will one day have a huge impact as its future citizens. I hope in a similar manner, my impact extends beyond [sharpening] mathematical understanding to [supporting students in] how to be productive, kind, discerning humans in our world.

Wong Baesa is resigning at the end of the school year to pursue a career outside of K-12 education. While she says she still fully believes in the importance of educating the future generation, she hopes to be able to do so outside of a classroom setting.

Kristen Bao (Stein)

Age: 29
Location: Oklahoma
Status: Left teaching in year three

Sadly, I left the classroom after the first quarter of the 2021-22 school year after teaching for just over two years. There were many factors that contributed to that decision.

On the practical side, I spent a great deal of effort on personal financial discipline during the first two years of my career and found success in attaining the short-term financial goal I had set for myself (saving up a six-month emergency fund). I also bought my first car, with $2,500 cash. So in year three of teaching, when I started thinking about my long-term goals and ran some financial planning calculations based on Oklahoma's pay-rate at the time, I found that even if I saved 33 percent of my income, between student loans and saving for retirement (because the compensation from the Teachers’ Retirement System of Oklahoma is not actually enough to live on during retirement), it would take me nearly a decade to be able to save for a down payment on a home. Even though I told myself every day to remember, “You're not in this for the money, you never were,” this realization was incredibly disheartening, and I don't think I was ever really able to get over that throughout the first nine weeks of the year I resigned.

At the same time, I also continued to deal with imposter syndrome. As a new teacher, I constantly felt inadequate, unable to accomplish the feats my veteran coworkers seemed to be completing with ease. I was always wondering when everyone — my principal, my students, their parents, my fellow teachers — would realize that I didn't belong there. These feelings were complicated by the fact that I was actually able to build amazing relationships with everyone in that list. Parents were lavishing me with gifts, words of gratitude and encouragement throughout the year. Students would write me notes telling me how much they loved having me as their teacher. Right before I resigned, my principal had even given me the most positive evaluation I had received since I started. She practically raved about how much I had improved in every area and how much potential she knew I still had to excel even further with time and patience.

But none of that was enough. I knew I couldn't sustain the level of success and productivity that she was depending on, or that my students needed. I had increasingly severe anxiety attacks throughout the first nine weeks of my third year of teaching. Some small thing would fall through the cracks, and I would experience symptoms such as shortness of breath for hours on end, a lump in my throat, being on the verge of tears, headaches and blurred vision. On the day that one of these attacks lasted the entire eight-hour school day, I finally opened up to my dearly beloved mentor teacher down the hall about all of these things. As I drove home after sharing with her, I knew it was time for me to step away.

I experimented with a few other career paths before I became a district executive for the Boy Scouts of America in September 2022. When this job found me, I knew it was an incredible opportunity to participate in an organization that precisely aligned with my passion. I know that I was created to contribute to helping children and families in my community flourish. This is exactly what I get to pour myself into when I wake up each morning in this current role.

Hannah Coffey (Long)

Age: 30
Location: Petaluma, California
Status: Still teaching
Starting salary: ~$46,000
Current salary: ~$83,000

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

I have taught the same grade, transitional kindergarten (TK), since I started teaching, but I have moved schools twice. In the 2021-22 school year, I moved to an elementary school in Santa Rosa, California. It was a significant raise in pay, but a 30-minute commute. That school has a lot of strengths and I learned a lot, but it had its flaws and complications as well. Long story short, I left. I almost stopped teaching.

Then, I got my dream job at Sonoma Mountain Charter. It is a wonderful school with a wonderful staff. It is close to my house, and I have the privilege of working with my mom, who is one of the school counselors in the district. It is an arts charter school, and there are a lot of ways teachers and students participate in the arts. Students learn to play instruments, participate in plays and engage in an amazing art adventure week, in which students are placed in mixed-age cohorts, and work on art projects together. As an artist myself, it is so nice to get to use my art degree so much in my professional life.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

One of the challenges I faced was with varying opinions over COVID protocols. My mom has cancer and my husband has asthma, so COVID could have been very serious for either of them; as a result my husband and I were incredibly careful. That part is still hard. I wear a mask to this day. At one point, I decided I was not going to wear a mask, and seven days later, I got COVID for the first time. So I went back to masking.

The most rewarding part of teaching is the ability to help shape the future. It is a big responsibility that I take very seriously. I try to teach using multicultural materials. I teach about gender inequality and how to be kind, empathetic and accepting. Setting the foundation for most more advanced skills is amazing. A huge part of teaching littles is helping them develop a love of learning. I have to tell my students that we can’t read words on the board anymore because it is time for recess, and they beg me to continue reading. They LOVE asking questions and discovering new things. It is really amazing and truly fun!

What has been the most surprising part of your teaching experience so far?

When we returned to school in March 2021 … I had a third of my class in person in the morning, another third of my class online at the same time, then the last third in person in the afternoon. [I was surprised by] how different the kids were from how they were at home [on Zoom], as well as some of the parenting choices that we were experiencing. It was hard to get a hold of parents, and we had to tell parents to put pants on and not swear while their kids were Zooming.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

I think that starting my career at the height of COVID shaped my teaching experience in a lot of different ways. We were asked to do so much. I had 28 students, and I taught a class that combined TK and kindergarten students. I was in graduate school. I was planning my wedding (which was ultimately postponed). My mom was in treatment. My [now] husband wasn’t working. It was an extremely stressful time, and then we went on an extended spring break and never came back that year. I remember driving around to my students’ houses at the end of the year just to say goodbye from a distance.

Teaching has gotten so much easier, which is normal, especially if you stay in the same grade. But it’s also because [other parts of my life have slowed down]. I graduated with my master’s degree, so that stress was gone. And I moved schools, so I was making more money, so that stress was gone. Then we had the wedding, so that stress was gone. The vaccines came out, so at least we were a little protected. Now I don’t have a long commute, I teach in a well-paying district, and I have a great team of early childhood educators I get to work with. I get to focus on making the kids’ experience at school the best one they could possibly have.

Mikia D. Frazier

Age: 27
Location: Hinesville, Georgia
Status: Still teaching
Salary: N/A

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

I have been extremely fortunate to continue teaching my favorite grade level, fourth grade, and my favorite subject, English language arts (ELA). Since starting my career, the dynamic of my department has changed a few times, so I’ve taught ELA by itself as well as ELA and social studies. Currently I am on a team of two [fourth grade teachers], so I teach ELA and social studies while my partner teaches math and science.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

The most challenging part of my job has been helping my students recover from the pandemic, in terms of educational progress and social-emotional development. My current fourth graders experienced “COVID learning” during their formative years of kindergarten and first grade. While they have been back to “regular school” for a few years, I can still see the social and emotional [gaps]. However, I do feel that they are making great strides.

Another challenging part of my job has been managing all that is expected of teachers inside and outside of the classroom. We wear so many hats and make so many decisions in a day. Our students, colleagues, communities and families need us to show up for them — all in different ways. Sometimes, it can get very overwhelming. Juggling being a teacher with being a full-time student has also been a very interesting feat. Since my first year teaching, I’ve earned two degrees — my master’s degree in 2020 and a specialist degree in 2022. I’m currently working toward my leadership certification and hope to begin a doctorate program soon. The balancing act is definitely a challenge, but I’m working extremely hard to achieve my personal and professional goals while continuing to enjoy the profession.

The most rewarding part of my job is, and will always be, the relationships that I build with my students. This year is definitely a full-circle moment, as I have realized that the first group of students I had when I entered the profession in 2019 is going to high school next year! Whenever I see them out and about in the community, they still talk about memories [from that year] and how I’m their favorite teacher. While teaching can be a very tough and demanding job, the children always find a way to remind me of my impact on their lives.

What has been the most surprising part of your teaching experience so far?

The most surprising part of my teaching experience thus far is the fact that being a teacher never stops. Of course, I always knew it was a full-time job. I knew that teachers spent weekends and late nights working on all of their school tasks. But I didn’t understand the reality that teaching becomes such a part of you, sometimes you can’t turn it off. I often catch myself randomly thinking about a new strategy to try or a new project to do. It surprises me that sometimes I simply just cannot turn it off.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

Starting my career at the height of COVID literally altered my brain chemistry as an educator. It was as if one of the wildest things that could ever happen actually did. I learned in that first year that anything can happen, and we have to learn to adapt. We were thrown into an entirely different realm of education with no handbook. Most of us were building the plane as we were flying it, but ultimately we landed safely. That first school year showed me that teachers are capable of absolutely anything. I figured that if I could survive that, I could survive anything. The experience taught me to adapt, [helped me develop] an immense level of patience and it taught me that I could persevere through a lot.

Steve Middleton

Age: 46
Location: San Antonio, Texas
Status: Still teaching
Starting salary: ~$56,000
Current salary: ~$58,000

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

Over the past five years, I've experienced both consistency and transitions in my teaching career. I started at one public middle school where I taught digital communications, and then moved to a different one in the district, called Bush Middle School. At Bush, I teach technology applications, computer science and robotics.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

In the past five years, the most challenging part of my job has been dealing with unsupportive colleagues at my previous school.

The most rewarding aspect has been implementing innovative strategies in my classes, such as starting a weekly email initiative in which students send an email home to their parents/guardians every Monday with an update about their learning. In the emails, students include a screenshot of their grades across all classes, two fun or interesting things from school, and a plan to complete any missing assignments. I’ve been doing this for about three years now, and it serves a few purposes. It breaks a negative cycle where parents only hear from their child’s school when something is wrong. It empowers students to take responsibility for their learning. It promotes transparency among students, teachers and families.

The weekly email is not schoolwide yet. However, word has gotten out, and my district has asked me to give a training on it to other technology teachers in the district for next school year.

What has been the most surprising part of your teaching experience so far?

The most surprising part of my teaching experience thus far has been witnessing the incredible resilience and determination of my students. Despite any challenges they may face, they continue to push forward and demonstrate their eagerness to learn. This unwavering dedication has been both humbling and inspiring, as it serves as a constant reminder that the work I do is ultimately about the students and their growth. Their perseverance has undoubtedly played a pivotal role in motivating me as an educator.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

This unprecedented situation compelled me to think outside the box, develop innovative solutions and adapt to constantly changing circumstances. It also taught me that fostering independent learning skills in students must begin at an early age. The pandemic served as a powerful reminder that, just as I cannot drink water for them when they are thirsty, I cannot absorb knowledge on their behalf — the effort to learn must come from within.