Teaching the next generation through a pandemic is an overwhelming task. Still, Stewart Akerley, a Portage la Prairie elementary teacher at La Verendrye School, looks at the situation through a more optimistic lens.

Akerley, a grade 5 teacher, explains how the return to in-person learning has gone for him after the week of remote learning that followed winter break as the province tried to get a grip on Omicron.

"it's been really great coming back," says Akerley. "Schools did everything they could to make sure that we would be safe with KN95 masks, spacing out desks and having vaccine clinics in the schools. I personally felt really good about coming back and seeing the kids again."

Mr. Akerley notes how the week of learning from home went for his class.

"I'm not going to lie. It was a bit of a gong show. Doing online learning is hard at the best of times, and we didn't really have the chance to prep our kids beforehand."

He says that a massive issue with remote learning is that students depend too much on technology, adding that the students' devices that they were forced to learn on, would either not work, die, or have to be shared with a sibling.

Akerley shares the mood of the room once students sat down at the desks again after learning in their pyjamas for a week.

"You could just see them relax and have a collective sigh of relief. And then it's just business like normal again."

He notes an ongoing battle that most teachers are facing through the pandemic.

"The hardest thing for me as a teacher has been deciding when is the right time to move on in the curriculum because there are so many kids missing that, if you move on, then, when they come back, you'd have to go back and sort of re-teach that. "

Akerley mentions another issue he has come across with remote learning: keeping the relationships he's built.

"Teachers are always building relationships with kids. And so, we're losing some of that contact with homes, and that's been tough too,"

The pandemic has come with ups and downs, but the elementary teacher is keeping his glass half full.

"People are always kind of ragging on the whole thing, but there have been some good things that have come out of this whole thing too," says Akerley. "I get to take my kids on virtual field trips that we wouldn't have been able to go on before. And they're writing assignments for me and handing them to me digitally through Google Docs. That's something that wouldn't have happened five years ago. I can't speak for everyone, but I've seen more attendance at parent-teacher meetings as a result. Parents don't have to get out of their warm homes in the middle of winter and come to the kids' classroom."

Students went back to in-person learning at schools in the province on January 17 after a week of remote learning. At this time, the province has made itself clear that the priority is to keep students and teachers in their classrooms.