Shop Class, Over Zoom
Editor’s Note: This story is the 16th in our series “On Teaching,” which aims to collect the wisdom and knowledge of veteran educators. As the coronavirus pandemic has forced the majority of American students to learn at home or remotely, we’re asking some of the country’s most experienced and accomplished teachers to share their advice and identify their students’ most urgent needs.
Wearing a mask and heavy work gloves, and keeping at least six feet away from passersby, Amani Benouardia—a freshman at Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School, a public high school in Massachusetts known as Essex Tech—spent a recent afternoon picking up litter on her street. Her tally included 14 plastic water bottles, 26 bottle caps, and 263 cigarette butts.
Benouardia is in Essex Tech’s environmental-science-and-technology program, which prepares students for careers in fields including wastewater management, ocean resource policy, and wildlife biology. She was supposed to take a school trip to the coast to look for shoreline debris. But with that canceled, Benouardia and
