COVID story: Zoom piano lessons give children another outlet during the pandemic

This story is published on Columbia Missourian.

When Margaret Waddell gives a piano lesson, the atmosphere is relaxed — even when her students are learning through Zoom.

As a piano teacher for 30 years, Waddell is serious about music teaching and learning, but she creates a friendly environment in her classes, even when they’re taking place online. The children introduce their pets to her and their classmates as a way of getting to know each other.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents its challenges, but Waddell, of Hummingbirdhouse Music Studio on East Walnut Street, said learning how to play the piano online allows children to interact with each other.

“A lot of children are stuck at home, not playing with anybody else except their sister or brother,” Waddell said. By attending music lessons online, children can participate in a group setting and have the chance to listen to others play.

Waddell said music is good for children’s spirits during this difficult time.

“If children are learning music, actively making music and playing games with music, they tend to be happier,” Waddell said.

Even before the pandemic, Waddell had been teaching two children from Chicago online for over a year. She said that experience made the transition to teaching entirely through Zoom a lot easier. Still, she had to make some changes.

To guarantee the quality of online learning, Waddell upgraded to fiber-optic service and a 5G connection. She has one webcam that focuses on her and an iPad that gives her students an overhead view of her piano keyboard. She is also directly wired in through an ethernet cable.

“It is important as the host of the Zoom classes,” Waddell said. “On the children’s end, it makes a big difference where they live, what type of internet they have, how good their device is, as far as screen resolution and sound capabilities.”

Some children have to make sure no one else in their family is using their household internet during the lesson.

Waddell said the content of her piano lessons hasn’t changed much.

“The only redesigning I did was to change the student groupings a bit for the summer, so I could put students together who were working on the same section of each book,” she said, adding that she now teaches three or four kids at a time.

Waddell acknowledged that online lessons aren’t for every child. She’s seen a slight decrease in enrollment. Still, she has about 20 children learning how to play the piano.

“I lost one family of two kids whose parents felt they were not doing well online,” she said.Waddell said music is a self-expression tool for children.

“Music is like language,” she said. “They can hear music in their mind, and they can sing it and speak it through their fingers.”

Elizabeth Shuman’s 7-year-old son, Nicholas, was one of the Chicago pupils to enroll in Waddell’s online lessons. She said the method Waddell uses, called Music Moves for Piano, which was created by Marilyn Lowe in conjunction with Edwin E. Gordon, differs from traditional approaches. It is based on the Music Learning Theory that Gordon researched for decades.

“This curriculum really highlights that kids can learn to play with music and discover so many different things,” Shuman said. “It is more holistic than other piano curricula.”

“We provide opportunity for children to listen and move their bodies, which helps them learn how to audiate music,” Waddell said. Audiation is the ability to think music in the mind with meaning.

She said she works with the idea of whole-part-whole.

“Children listen and move to a piece of music, and we break it down into two parts: the tonal patterns and the rhythm patterns, which helps them create meaning in their minds.”

In this way, Waddell can get feedback from children’s responses to the patterns she speaks or sings and can understand how well the children are hearing music in their minds and comprehending it.

“After working on parts, we return to the whole piece with greater understanding,” Waddell said.

At the beginning of an August lesson with three students, Waddell asked the children to move their bodies with her while she sang a song. The pace and weight of her movements matched the rhythm of the song. Waddell said that learning the elements of movement — time, weight, space and flow, as developed by Rudolf Laban, an Austro-Hungarian dance artist and theorist — helps children understand the elements of music.

“In this way, they will learn how to play the song lightly or heavily, with free flow or bound flow, and so on,” she said.Charley McDonald, 7, is another of Waddell’s students. Waddell said Charley has become quite creative with her music. A key component of Music Moves for Piano is to encourage students to create and improvise and to compose their own songs.

“She makes up her own tunes all the time, and they are beautiful,” Waddell said. Charley even composed a song for Waddell.Charley used to take in-person lessons with Waddell and at first was less interested in online lessons. Waddell said she even thought about quitting. Charley’s mother, Katherine McDonald, recalled having a difficult time getting her daughter to attend a Zoom lesson one day.

“But she had a wonderful lesson and told me right after class that she was really glad she participated and she was going to miss Margaret the next week when she wasn’t going to be available to make the Zoom lesson,” McDonald said.

Waddell followed up with a long telephone conversation with Charley to help her better understand the learning process, Waddell’s role in it, how different each kid is and Charley’s choices as a learner. Waddell wanted Charley to see how well she was actually doing to help raise her self-esteem.

Charley decided not to quit.

“I think she really understood what I was saying,” Waddell said.

COVID story: Douglass High School celebrates the class of 2020

This story is published on Columbia Missourian.

Rain did not stop the graduation ceremony for Frederick Douglass High School.

The pandemic did not stop the graduates of the class of 2020 from getting their diplomas, either.

Originally, the ceremony was scheduled to be held on the front lawn at Douglass High School. Due to the wet weather, the ceremony was held inside the Hickman High School Auditorium.

Debra O'Neal said she was both apprehensive and scared to attend this special ceremony with masks and social distancing requirements.

Her son, Blake Ramey, 18, is one of the graduates there, who was once interested in sports.

O‘Neal said her son hurt his back when he was 15. Since then, he could not do sports and was passive in doing anything. He transferred among a couple of high schools, and finally attended Douglass High School and got a diploma.

The parents said they kept encouraging their son, talking to him a lot.

"He just doesn't listen," O‘Neal said. But she believes that he will finally understand them, "He becomes more mature and now works part-time at (Columbia) Activity & Recreation Center."

Bob Kelley, the pastor at LifeRock Church, attended the ceremony for his friend's son, Gregory McSwain.

Kelley met McSwain's mom, Angelia Stewart, in 2001. He gave a ride home to Stewart after she gave birth to McSwain at the hospital.

Stewart passed away five or six years ago because of breast cancer. Kelley said she was always a role model for her children and people around her.

As a single mother, she had to take care of six children in total, including three from her murdered sister, Kelley said.

"She loved the joy and satisfaction that came from working on a job. She said that while working, she even lost her government-provided insurance because her income had risen," Kelley said.

She told Kelley, "Pastor, I could actually make more money sitting at home and drawing a check from the government, but my kids need to see me going to work every day, and especially my boys. They need to see me getting up and going to work."

Kelley said Stewart inspired her son a lot. He is happy to see him graduate and wants to congratulate McSwain for his accomplishment, he said.

There were 75 graduates this year and Dr. Eryca Neville, principal of Douglass High School, said the number was almost the same compared to recent years. Around 200 people attended the commencement.

Graduates went on stage to accept the diplomas. At the end of the ceremony, Neville asked them to rise from their chairs.

As they stood up, they were surrounded by camera flashes, applause and cheers. They were the focus of the auditorium at that moment.

"This year has required that we be courageous, apply critical thinking skills, dig deep into our creativity, use technology in new and innovative ways, value and honor the needs of the common good above the wants of the individual and most of all, to rethink what we consider 'normal' to be," Neville said in the speech for the commencement.

"This pandemic does not define you. But it should remind and compel you to value and cherish life, to celebrate the moments, and to always be your best self," she told the graduates.

Janeth Alulea, 18, said she wants to thank all the teachers helping with her studies. "They reminded me to do the online assignments," she said.

Sierra Bilderback, 18, said she technically graduated before the pandemic, and she was excited to be able to attend the ceremony eventually.

Jaheim Dudley, another graduate, said he feels surprised that he managed to graduate. He said he did bad at school a couple of years ago, and transferred from Hickman High School to Douglass High School.

"One of the challenges for me is to get into a routine of school work. When you get into high school, you really need to focus on study," he said. Dudley said he became more grown-up during the process and finally got used to it.

Both Alulea and Dudley plan to attend college in the future.

COVID Story: Columbia College embraces new instructional mode

This story is published on Columbia Missourian.

Columbia College has offered online education for 20 years and virtual classes for five.

Now, because of the pandemic, the college is offering students a flexible teaching model for the fall semester.

The High-Flex program will allow students to choose each day how they want to attend classes, in-person or virtually. That means they can choose to attend in-person classes on a particular day and switch to virtual learning whenever they like.

“We plan to provide an excellent education to our students and want to keep people safe,” said Piyusha Singh, provost and senior vice president of Columbia College.

Singh said the approach gives students the flexibility they need to take care of their own needs.

Singh highlighted the difference between virtual learning and online learning. “Online classes are asynchronous, while the instruction of virtual classes is happening between the teachers and students at the same time.”

Singh said the college has offered multiple training opportunities on teaching virtually that included information on technology and the pedagogical requirements of teaching remotely.

The college has more than 800 undergraduate courses offered through the online program, along with 29 online degrees and more than 4,702 online program students nationwide, according to data on its website.

The college also gets a lot of transfer students.

The numbers haven’t changed much since the pandemic began, Singh said, as enrollment in its online programs has remained steady. Only time will tell if new students will gravitate to its online program once they decide whether or not to return to other universities in August.

She said the college has drawn on its experience with online and virtual programs to make instructional plans during the pandemic.

“We’re just taking the things we’ve done together before and putting them together differently,” she said.

Carli Buschjost, a senior majoring in biology at Columbia College, said the new teaching model can benefit both professors and students.

“Professors can teach in different ways, and students can choose their ways to learn. I think it will bring up more opportunities and keep everyone safe and comfortable in this situation,” Buschjost said.

Buschjost said she will take as many in-person classes as possible in the fall semester because she prefers traditional classes.

Columbia College has been preparing for in-person classes in the fall. Classrooms and dining halls have been restructured to ensure students maintain 6 feet of social distance. “If there’s a classroom that can’t have more than 10 students at social distance, we will lower the class capacity,” Singh said.

Students will also be required to wear masks to attend in-person classes. The changes aren’t over, Singh said.

“We all need to learn to respond to the accelerated pace of change,” she said. “And I really think that Columbia College is modeling that for our students. We’re in a very intense situation, and rather than just do the same old thing, we’re using a crisis to see where we can innovate and how we can support our students in different ways.”