CAMDEN — When the schools closed, the hardest challenge at first for Jen Marisi was balancing her responsibilities as a mother and as a technology/STEM teacher at Saint Peter School in Merchantville.
Then Marisi – a young woman and a runner – got sick. She was diagnosed with COVID-19 and pneumonia.
“So it was extra hard then,” said Marisi, who is one of the parents that answered an email from the Catholic Schools Office asking how families were coping with quarantine.
She has since recovered, and now says her children have been adapting well to the changes in their lives. But there have been difficulties.
“In the beginning, my oldest had a moment of fear where she just needed a shoulder to cry on,” Marisi said. “She also was scared when I got sick.”
Another woman, the mother of a high school senior, wrote, “As a parent, you hurt when your child hurts.”
“Senior year is what every student looks forward to from the first day entering high school,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous.
In addition to being a parent, she is a teacher at a South Jersey Catholic school. She expressed her disappointment about how the school year is ending for her students as well as her own daughter. She feels a sense of loss herself.
“This is the time of the year primary teachers look forward to the most: seeing the students you worked with all year become more independent. I miss being able to use the phrase my ‘almost Kindergarteners’ or my ‘almost First Graders,”’ said the teacher.
“I enjoy spending time with my students, hearing their little voices singing and giggling, hearing them say their prayers, watching them share, take turns and grow; academically, socially and spiritually,” she said. “I miss my job, because I miss being their teacher.
But she still is a teacher – a teacher that routinely assigns and reviews her students’ work and interacts with their parents. She misses giving a student a physical high five – with their hands actually touching – and she prefers a handwritten note to an email. But the work continues day by day.
For Christina Figurelli, another mother and Catholic school teacher, the location of her work has changed but not her schedule, with the exception that now she is able to eat a midday meal with her children.
“We all get up and get dressed by about 8:30-9, sometimes earlier. We each have our own workspace and we break for lunch together,” said Figurelli, a Pre-K3 teacher at Saint Michael the Archangel Regional School, Clayton.
For Marisi, the tech teacher, using technology was already a major part of her life, so the shift to remote learning, and even quarantine, has not been especially jarring.
“We live-stream Mass every Sunday. Also, we have school prayers on Zoom with Saint Peter’s three times a day so we are still praying multiple times a day,” she said.
And when it comes to maintaining contact with friends and relatives, “We have been calling and Zooming so much, maybe even more than normal times,” she added.
On the other hand, she said, “We really miss our school friends and going out.”
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