Long-Distance Relationships

Teaching Web design to a blind student, a seasoned online teacher sees his job afresh.

Story and photos by Bracken Reed

Federal Way, Washington—When veteran teacher Lowell Schaefer first heard about a new online school being developed by the Federal Way School District, he was skeptical. "My first reaction," Schaefer recalls, "was, well, here we go—another way of taking the teacher out of the classroom, another way of making things more impersonal."

An artist as well as a teacher, Schaefer had been at Thomas Jefferson High School for 25 years and was not afraid of change. In his photography, drawing, graphic arts, and Web design classes, he had always attempted to stay on the cutting edge, incorporating new technologies and sharing the latest trends and techniques with his students. Still, there was one tenet he held sacred: forging meaningful, face-to-face connections with his students was, for him, the foundation of a successful classroom experience.

"I've always had a teaching style where I get to know my students," says Schaefer, "just by doing things like throwing my own interests out there and letting them respond to that and vice versa." That kind of back-and-forth, give-and-take was what made teaching enjoyable for him, and what made students enjoy taking his classes.

Online classes, he felt, would take away that connection and leave only a bland, uninspired transfer of information. Not exactly a recipe for success.

Getting Online

Schaefer's natural curiosity got the better of him, however. Despite his doubts, he couldn't resist attending the district's first couple of meetings about the online school. What he saw at those meetings turned his assumptions upside down.

"They did some presentations with elementary and middle school teachers who were working with small groups of students within the district, mostly online," he says. "I got to thinking about it, and I realized that it was quite different than what my first uneducated impression was."

Schaefer began to reexamine his current situation. His ability to create a dynamic classroom environment had been slowly deteriorating, he felt—eaten away by budget cuts, larger class sizes, limited equipment and supplies, and occasional disciplinary problems. Despite his best efforts, the classroom was becoming less personal and less individualized. The more he thought about online learning, the more he saw its potential to sidestep these problems and allow him to teach straight to the individual student.

As the district pushed forward with its online initiative, Schaefer went from skeptic to curious observer to full-on participant. The shift was gradual, but by the fall of 1996, when the Internet Academy—as the online school came to be called—was fully operational, Schaefer had written curricula for several courses, including photography, graphic arts, drawing, Web design, and middle school art appreciation.

It was not long before he found himself driving each day to a one-level business park in this sprawling suburb south of Seattle. Surrounded by insurance companies, mortgage brokers, and other small businesses, without a school bus in sight, the Academy was unlike any school he could have imagined when he first chose the profession in the early 1970s.

As he settled in to the new job, logging on to a computer each day from his comfortable, low-lit office, Schaefer saw that his initial fears were not only unfounded, but that the reality was better than he could have imagined. For the first time in years, he felt that he was able to focus directly on the curriculum and the students, with few distractions.

"What I have found," he says, "is that working with students on the Internet I actually get to know them better, in many cases, and get to know more of them, in a more personal way, than I ever did in the regular classroom."

The reasons for this, he says, are many. "Number one, in the regular classroom you're dealing with large groups of students and you're lucky to be able to interact, uninterrupted, for more than just a few seconds or at most a minute, with any one student. Also, when you're doing presentations or you're doing instruction, maybe one or two hands pop up, one or two kids who are actually responding, whereas, in this [online] format, every single student is responding, because every student has their 'hand' up as soon as they finish their homework. Anytime a student has a question or needs help they can e-mail me and I get back to them as soon as possible. They get immediate attention, and that's something I couldn't always do in the classroom—get to everybody, each day, whenever they really needed help."

The online format also allowed Schaefer to individualize the curriculum more effectively by adding supplemental materials, encouraging students to find the learning style that worked best for them, and to go at their own pace.

He also rediscovered the power of the written word. According to Schaefer, whatever Web-based courses lack in visual cues and verbal subtleties is more than made up for by the inherent intimacy of one-to-one writing. "Most students are much more open in an e-mail than they would ever be in class," he says. "They don't have the anxiety of speaking up in front of a whole group, and there's time to compose their thoughts and to get them down just how they want them. The English language is so powerful, an e-mail can express a lot about you—your sense of humor, your mood—that might not get expressed in a regular classroom."

The online format also appealed to Schaefer's natural affinity for the nontraditional student. "We have a lot of students who couldn't be educated as effectively in any other way," he says. "We had a student a couple years ago, for example, who was an extreme hemophiliac. He could only type for about five or 10 minutes at a time or he'd be black and blue up to his wrist. He couldn't leave home—any little bump or scratch could be fatal for him."

Whether it's a foreign exchange student needing to take English-language classes while overseas, a homeschooler in rural eastern Washington, a traveling musician, a child actor, a cancer patient, a single mother, or the Olympic speed skater, Apolo Ohno, Schaefer enjoys the diversity and uniqueness of working with all those who find themselves outside the ring of the mainstream classroom's campfire.

Ironically, the one common thread that connects nearly all of Schaefer's online students is that he will never meet them. But this, too, he has come to see in a positive light. "Ninety-nine percent of my students I never meet face to face," he says, "but that's one of the aspects of teaching online that can actually be great. I'm not influenced by their daily activities—whether they're 'good' in my class or not. I don't know what color they are, how tall they are, whether they're heavyset, whether they're delaying a bit in doing their assignments, whether they've had past behavioral problems. I'm just looking at the product of their efforts in my class."

Through The Lines, Across The Differences

Among the online students whom Schaefer has never met is a senior at the Washington State School for the Blind (WSSB) in Vancouver, Washington, named Darrell.

When he signed up for Schaefer's Web Design class in the spring of 2004, Darrell had only taken one other online class, an eighth-grade course in the history of the Pacific Northwest, which had been a mixed success. He had liked the instructor but had failed to connect with the subject matter or to fully embrace the online format. But in the Web Design class it all clicked.

A big reason for that was Schaefer's flexible teaching style and ability to create personal connections with his students. "He was extremely easygoing and easy to communicate with," says Darrell. "With all of my courses I feel like it's important that teachers try to communicate as though they understand our generation. I found it very nice that even though on his home page he said to use proper grammar and all that, Mr. Schaefer was communicating as if he was about 20 in our e-mails. I feel like I made a better connection with him than I have with any teacher, except for a very few others, out of all my classes in public school."

The difference in appearance and circumstance between Darrell and Schaefer would be hard to exaggerate. Gray-haired, nearing retirement, and casually but neatly dressed, Schaefer exudes calm and a certain level of hard-earned, middle class comfort. Though well over six feet tall and with a bear-like frame, there is a grace to his manners, a glint of humor in his eyes, and a soft, deliberate way of speaking that belies a contemplative and artistic nature.

At 18 years old, with wavy brown hair and a stocky, wrestler's build, Darrell is a complex mix of teenage energy, breathless enthusiasm, and a wise-beyond-his-years intensity. Behind the heavy-metal garb, mutton chops, and rebel attitude is a remarkably disciplined, mature, and focused individual who has endured a great deal of hardship without letting it dampen his infectious love of life.

Legally blind from birth, Darrell has had a multitude of operations to stabilize his degenerative vision. Active cataracts interfere with his already limited sight, which, at best corrected, is rated at 20/200. In layman's terms, that means that what he can see at 20 feet, a person with 20/20 vision can see at 200 feet. In practical terms, it means that activities such as driving are out, but working on a computer is still possible. In fact, Darrell chooses to work on a computer by placing himself one to four inches from a high-contrast color screen, rather than by using adaptive tools such as magnifiers or screen readers, which he finds intrusive. "I don't need them, they get in the way, and I don't like them," he says in a tone that fully conveys his fierce independence.

For the past four and a half years he has shuttled back and forth along the I-5 corridor, spending weekends at his parents' house in Auburn and weekdays at his small cottage dorm room on the WSSB campus. Every Friday afternoon the school's charter bus takes him home and every Sunday it carries him back to the school again.

In between, he leads a life of intense, self-imposed strictness, getting up at 4:30 every morning ("3:30 on laundry day") and taking a full class load that starts at 6:15, includes classes at nearby Hudson's Bay High School, and extends through an after-school exercise program called goalball. The sport was designed specifically for the blind, and he takes obvious competitive pleasure in participating.

On top of this he pursues his other passions: computers, art, sci-fi and fantasy novels, heavy metal and alternative rock music, and an obsession with the Japanese style of animation called anime. His desire to live life to the fullest, squeezing every drop out of a day, means he routinely gets only four hours of sleep a night, making up for it, he says, with lazy weekend mornings.

It's this passion for life and thirst for knowledge that came through loud and clear to Schaefer. "Darrell was so interested in the coursework," he says. "He was catching on so quickly, and then I got into conversations with him about what he was doing, how he was doing things, what kind of set-ups he was using, and it built from there."

For Darrell, the class was an ideal match of interesting subject matter, a great teacher, and a flexible schedule. "I could go at my own pace," he says. "I didn't have to try and push the slowest people in the class so that I could keep learning. And Mr. Schaefer was just so cool. He greatly appreciated my work ethic and he always got a kick out of my Web pages."

The bond was sealed when the two realized that Darrell's Auburn home and Schaefer's residence at the time were only five miles apart. Attempts were made to arrange a face-to-face meeting, but separate spring breaks, travel plans, and busy schedules got in the way. The two never met, but they still speak fondly of each other. And the connection may not end there. While Schaefer nears retirement and looks forward to enjoying his new home on Anderson Island, Darrell nears graduation and is busy applying to colleges. His desire, he says, is to someday be a high school English teacher.

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