Teacher Helps 6th Grader With Math Problem By Teaching From Her Porch

Sixth-grade math teacher schools a student outside her home during continued lockdowns

Schools across the country have shut down for the rest of the month, and in some cases — the rest of the academic year — and while parents are doing their best to homeschool and work from home, this is a rough period for kids and parents alike. If we didn’t already know how important teachers are in the lives of their students, this lockdown period has reinforced how vital that role is, and for one sixth grade math teacher in Madison, South Dakota, his duties didn’t stop just because the classroom is closed. A dad shared a photo of his daughter’s math teacher on the family’s front porch, giving her a math lesson from a safe distance.

“My 6th grader emailed her math teacher for some help, so he came over & worked through the problem with her on our front porch,” dad Josh Anderson wrote on Twitter alongside a photo of his daughter and her teacher Chris Waba working on a math equation through the doorway.

Instead of just shooting off an email, this hero teacher at Madison Middle School brought a whiteboard and a pen to his student’s house to make sure she truly understood her math homework. According to Anderson’s tweet, Mr. Waba is not just his daughter’s math teacher, but the school’s wrestling coach and their neighbor. Anderson tells Scary Mommy that having a teacher for a neighbor is extremely helpful during these trying times, but added that “if [Waba] needed to do this with other students, he certainly would. If he is, he wouldn’t be telling anybody or bragging about it either. He’s just a great man and an excellent teacher.”

The school shared a photo too, writing, “MMS Teacher Chris Waba went to the door to help a student with math today.”

“There are many highs and lows to this home-schooling, so any and all extra help that teachers are doing for their students is benefitting all of us, students and parents,” Anderson told Scary Mommy. “We are very thankful and appreciative of all of our teachers, especially those helping our own three children.”

Coronavirus has absolutely changed the face of education as we know it and to ease students’ minds during this time, teachers all over the country are coming up with smart and creative ways to keep morale high and students engaged. Some teachers and schools are organizing COVID-19 parades, where families hop into the car and drive through their neighborhood, waving at friends and colleagues with “we miss you” signs, while a high school acting teacher in New Jersey has gone viral for assigning her students the task of writing an original song about their feelings of loneliness and anxiety during coronavirus.

When our culture returns to something resembling normalcy, let’s make sure to show our nation’s teachers some extra love. They certainly deserve it.