“Do you think teaching virtual is easy?”  Mr. Cucura, our newest EL teacher at West Scranton Intermediate School, says that he thinks teaching virtually was a little easy on him. He explained in his response that he teaches English virtually to kids from China, so the transition to the virtual platform was familiar to him. Mr. Cucura also says that the pros of teaching virtual are that everyone can work at their own pace. They can go into “Google Classroom” to see what assignments they might be missing. When asked what might be a drawback of virtual teaching, Mr. Cucura explained that some students share one computer with other family members, which you can see can cause some difficulties with trying to attend meets.

Another question everyone might be asking themselves is, “When are we going back to school?” Mr.Cucura is not sure if we will not be going back in this school year, but thinks we can possibly return starting the school year 2021-2022. The COVID-19 cases are still going up. At the time of this publication, there are 548,489 total cases statewide of COVID in Pennsylvania alone. Right now, teachers and students alike can only speculate about our return to school, stay safe, and hope for the best! 

Getting to know Mr. Cucura a little better, aside from teaching EL at WSIS, we learned he also teaches sixth through eighth grade. He was born in Blakely, Pennsylvania. Mr. Cucura comes from a family of teachers–he has three cousins who are teachers and his wife is a college professor! Welcome to West, Mr. Cucura! We cannot wait to meet you in person. We are sure you are already seeing that West is Best–even virtually!