DES MOINES, Iowa —
Brooke and Macie Ault always lived for the first day of school. And even when the school day was over, they didn't want to stop.
"We were all the time wanting to come home from school to play school," said Brooke.
It's the reason they asked for a school projector for Christmas one year, so they could play 'student and teacher' at home.
After graduating from Southeast Polk High School, their passion for the classroom at a young age led them both attend UNI for the Early Childhood Education program.
"We always said we want to build relationships with our students and be the person for them that they can can come to whenever and just build them up and really help them," said Macie.
But after student teaching in the fall of 2019, the COVID-19 crisis in March threw a wrench in their substitute teaching and job application process.
"After Spring break, everything was closed; obviously we didn’t get to have anymore experience with that," said Macie. "It kind of stunk because obviously we were out of a job, out of experience, and then also kind of out of getting our names out there to different principals and schools."
Macie was able to secure a job as a Kindergarten teacher at Stowe Elementary with the Des Moines Public School district in the Fall. But starting as a front line worker in the classroom during COVID-19 comes with many unknowns.
The other kindergarten teachers [at Stowe] have been very helpful...you know, we're all in this together," said Macie. "So it has been helpful in that sense, but just the unknowns and everything is kind of terrifying."
The UNI Education Department is working to prepare future teachers for those unknowns now more than ever.
Mary Donegan-Ritter, associate professor of Early Childhood Education at UNI, says the past semester, when she served as Interim Department Head of the Education Department, was a wild one.
"[The students] hear throughout their teacher preparation program that teachers have to be flexible," said Donegan-Ritter. "We are a heavy face-to-face field; we are a heavy face-to-face campus. And yet our faculty and our students particularly our students and our field really demonstrated resilience."
That resilience came in the form of adapting student teaching experiences to accommodate virtual learning and virtual assistance with cooperating teachers.
Donegan-Ritter says UNI has about 1,600 students out in the field each semester, including around 300 student teachers. Those newly-minted teachers are adapting quickly to the latest classroom technology, having experienced their last semester partially online themselves. She says that makes them more qualified to set foot into the classroom as a leader in this "new world."
"I think this coming year will be different," said Donegan-Ritter. "Having a bunch of new teachers who are really comfortable with the whole Google Suite of tools, who have had a combination of doing online learning and face-to-face themselves, I think they’ll be able to bring some strengths to some of the veteran teachers that they’ll be working with."
Brooke says some of those veteran teachers have said that indeed, she and Macie will have some advantages.
"[The teachers] are like 'maybe it won’t be as bad, because you don’t know any different!' And I’m kind of like--that’s actually a good thought," said Brooke.
Brooke plans to take some long-term substitute teaching jobs in the fall as she continues searching for a full-time teaching job, while Macie looks forward to starting at Stowe in August, with Des Moines Public Schools.