SAN ANTONIO – Gaining the trust of teenagers can be difficult, especially for authority figures. Brandeis English teacher Bonnie Middleton is not letting distance learning take away the relationships she’s spent all year cultivating.

“We built families with those classes and those kids and that’s where we want to be,” said Middleton.

The teacher says she misses her students, but she’s more worried about how they’re doing in quarantine.

“We’re more than teachers, we’re counselors for them, they come to us with their problems, they eat lunch in our classrooms,” Middleton said.

In addition to teaching online, she’s experimenting with digital ways to stay close to her students.

She tweets out photos of what her days look like and has gotten more active on TikTok. She shares as much as she can on social media, knowing her students check regularly.

“The thing right now is to let students know that they’re not alone and we haven’t left them behind,” Middleton said.

She sends out weekly surveys checking in on how they’re doing.

“I’ve had some of them open up to me on that, telling me about struggles they’re having in relationships, struggles at home, taking care of their younger siblings,” Middleton said. “They’re managing it a lot better than I expected. They’re very positive about it.”

She also hosts virtual office hours and asks students to send in their own videos.

“I think they’re surprised by how much they want to come back to school,” Middleton said. “I think it’s shocking to them.”

She tries to be honest with her students, but right now it’s hard when she doesn’t have all of the answers.

“You know, they want to know - ‘Do you think we’re going to get to go back to school? Are we ever going to see each other again?’ That sort of stuff,” Middleton said. “And I don’t really have an answer for them but I can at least tell them that I’m feeling the same thing they’re feeling and we can talk through it.”

Middleton says many of her students look forward to doing their online work, just to pass the time.