“Low engagement, across the board,” Latin teacher Jennifer Hoffman said of the most significant obstacle facing PAC this year. “Low engagement from teachers, low engagement from students, low engagement from, really everyone.”
Last school year, Hoffman was a member of the committee tasked with addressing the social and emotional needs of students when the majority of the school came back to the building in person last August. After almost a year of weekly meetings, the group finalized its plan for what Wildcat “Pause and Connect” (PAC) would look like.
Although its intentions were to alleviate stress and catalyze the forming of strong bonds among the groups it put together, many students, like sophomore Alina Xie and senior Reilly Galloway, found the program to be ineffective and sometimes counterproductive.
“I see what PAC is trying to do, but it’s not the right way to do it,” Xie said. “Right now, it’s a waste of time.”
Galloway initially thought that PAC would be a valuable addition to the weekly schedule, but realized throughout the year that it wasn’t going to be like what he had envisioned.
“Originally, I thought it was a good idea. I thought it was going to be a good way to tackle mental health issues and stuff like that,” he said. “But I don’t think they did that right, it was executed really poorly.”
Galloway cites that he doesn’t even know if his PAC leader does the right lessons, and that some of the exercises in which they participate do more harm than good.
“[My PAC leader] does lessons, but I don’t know if they were given to him through the school or not because I ask other PAC teachers and their students get completely different lessons,” he said. “Sometimes it’s really nice and we go on a walk around the school, or we play some kind of game. More recently, we watched a rather disturbing video. It made me a little bit anxious.”
Other PAC leaders have stopped doing lessons entirely during the time allotted to PAC, basically turning it into free time for some students.
“My PAC teacher didn’t do any of the lessons after the first couple of weeks, and there really aren’t any activities that we do as a group,” Xie said. “So, it’s a free period when you need it, which works well for me.”
Senior Regan Kane appreciates the break in the day, but wishes that the lessons were more beneficial.
“It gave me time in the middle of the day to do my work and it made my classes shorter, so I can’t complain,” she said. “But I wish we actually did something. I wish it was helpful, like it was actually a class that was positive and [helped us build] connections.”
PAC was specifically designed to encourage students to interact with people with whom they’ve never had classes. School social worker Melissa Breaden supposes that the reason that students like Kane don’t find the lessons useful is that they assume a level of comfort among strangers that often isn’t realistic.
“The lessons are built on the basis that everyone has trust in one another, and that’s not entirely true in my PAC,” Breaden said. “There needed to be options and flexibility for each PAC so that a bond can be formed in whatever way possible.”
ESL teacher Gregory Cain tried to take advantage of the allotted PAC time with his group, even if it often meant diverting from the lesson plans.
“Sometimes you can’t necessarily force people to open up as quickly as it seemed the lessons were dictating, so I had a different attitude,” he said. “We would tweak a lot of it, and the outcome was student contentment, relationships and comfort. I wanted them to feel at ease amongst themselves.”
Cain went so far as to make shirts for his PAC that they would wear on Wednesdays.
“So, I’m Canadian,” he said. “And, one day after winter break, I said, ‘I’m going to make t-shirts,’ and they said, ‘We love it.’ So I said, ‘Let’s see what ideas you have,’ and one student said, ‘How about “Be nice, act Canadian,”’ as, like, our mantra for the group. And these kids went with it.”
After much deliberation, the final shirt design had “Mr. Cain’s PAC” on the front, and “Be Nice, Act Canadian” on the back above a Canadian maple leaf.
Cain acknowledges, though, that some PACs’ outcomes could be determined by the comfort level of the students and teacher with being vulnerable, and that he happened to be assigned a group of students that were willing to commit to making their time in PAC valuable.
“[My students] were positive and enthusiastic, and I was the same, and we kind of met together in that way,” he said. “But I was very fortunate that I had a good group.”
Unlike the sophomores in Cain’s PAC, some upperclassmen feel that their needs weren’t taken into account. Galloway took issue with the disruption to the schedule because it felt out of touch with the stresses that many seniors felt throughout most of the year, specifically relating to college applications and taking AP classes.
“Especially for seniors, PAC should have been very different. At the start of the year, we could have done more college-based activities, and then near the end we could have done much more relaxed sessions,” he said. “I heard of some [PAC leaders] just saying, ‘You can use this period to do classwork.’ Since I’m taking the most APs I’ve ever taken in high school, I really would have liked more free time.”
Kane felt that PAC’s aim was designed for underclassmen and not adequately adapted to fit seniors’ needs.
“From what I’ve heard, it’s for freshmen and sophomores to meet people that aren’t in their classes and to become friends with them,” Kane said. “They picked [PACs of people] that you don’t know, but we’re leaving.”
Despite her best efforts in helping design the program, Hoffman foresaw the immediacy and intimacy of PAC causing conflict after more than a year of online school.
“I asked, as a committee member, to have PAC be postponed for a year because I didn’t think we were ready,” she said. “I had a feeling that this year was going to be a different experience, that we were going to need some time to really readjust from being away and then coming back. I don’t think we were ready for it.”
Hoffman maintains that PAC could work as intended in more normal circumstances, and that changes can be made to improve participation.
“I think, in an ideal year, it would have been great, and I think that we’re hoping to change something so that it can be more engaging,” she said.
