Is remote learning an acceptable alternative to the classroom?
Photo from Pixabay.com
Since the pandemic started and we locked down schools, many kids have been pursuing their education online. Nearly every family in the country had to navigate through their children’s lessons and assignments. They had to learn to use a bunch of new apps. Suddenly everyone was an expert on education. And opinions on the situation are like a-holes, everyone’s got one. Essentially, however, they all lead to the same question: did remote learning fail our kids?
We hear that online school is a joke, that Zoom sessions for kids are stupid. That kids should just stay safe at home and start back at school next year. The losses are inescapable anyway. Why fight it? Others claim that teachers are utilizing too much technology and expecting too much effort from their remotely placed students. No one agrees on anything accept that we failed our kids. Shame on us.
My day job happens to be teaching math in high school. I’m lucky in that my students are old enough to stay home alone and do their lessons without much parental input. And, during our last quarter of the 2019-2020 school year, they overwhelmingly did their work for me.
Of course, high school is very different from elementary school, kindergarten, and special needs education. There’s no way you can leave a 2nd grader or special needs kid at home by herself to “do school.” I realize that there is a wide range of needs in our households and I ended up dealing with the easier side.
It Didn’t All Suck
But before we decide that all this modern pandemic education sucks and our kids are going to hell in a hand basket, let’s take a moment here and just think about this. Remember, this is an unprecedented event in our modern lives. The fact that we could work and educate remotely (however haphazardly) at all is positive and significant.
I may not speak for everyone who worked from home, but I know that I was undeniably grateful to continue my employment and teach my classes. I communicated with my students every day and kept them on schedule to graduate. Sure, some of my kids have a few deficits compared to students from previous years, but I’m also sure that there are others who worked better, and even harder, at home.
If you pay attention to such things in the news, however, all you heard was how lousy remote education was. Making their kids show up for a virtual class was simply annoying to many parents; the lessons that were assigned were “busy” work. It seemed like school was suddenly either way too easy or way too hard. The most interesting refrain I heard, however, was the one that suggested school was simply babysitting so why are we going to all this trouble?
Education or Babysitting?
Believe it or not, I agree with the idea that school is mostly babysitting, especially for the secondary crowd. We take way too long to teach kids the basics: twelve to thirteen years of school is too much time for kids to learn to read, write reasonably well, master some basic number sense, and become competent in technology.
A million years ago, when I was in school, few mothers were working. Kids went straight home after school. There was no such thing as “day care.” Today’s longer school hours, extended programs, daycare, and earlier entry into school (pre-k 2 anyone?) have popped up because parents need them. If both parents have to work full time and often late hours, then school meets very different needs for those families than it does for households in which a parent is home every day.
Schools Are Overwhelmed
And that is a big part of the problem: we expect schools to do everything. Feed kids; keep them safe; make sure they learn; give them sports for physical activity; show them how to behave, provide mental health counseling; ensure they are productively occupied until parents get home from work. The time that kids spend on campus has increased, but what we need to teach them really hasn’t.
No one really talks much about that, though, which is why the remote learning situation at the end of the 2019-2020 school year was so weird. Parents and most teachers expected that to “replace” the learning their kids did in school we just needed to copy the methods from the classroom. Kids have forty minutes of math every school day, so have forty minutes at home. Foreign languages consume an hour of instructional time twice a week, so schedule two hour-long sessions remotely. The same goes for the other subjects.
Crowd Control vs. Learning Time
The thing is, when there’s not twenty to thirty people to manage, learning doesn’t take as long. The truth is that a lot of time is burned in today’s school day for all the crowd control, transportation (imagine walking twenty five boisterous first graders to and from art, lunch, and recess every day), and bathroom breaks. Not to mention special occasions like holiday parties, guest speakers, or assemblies. If you take a six or seven hour school day and try to replicate it at home, you will fail. Badly. No one teaches, or learns, for the whole day at school. They won’t at home, either.
The decision by so many schools to simply replicate the school day at home was not well conceived. But people did the best they could—parents and teachers alike. It’s unnerving to hear parents criticizing teachers for their assignments like they just dropped a nuclear bomb on their families. Equally upsetting is the lack of understanding some teachers exhibited toward their students. Parents really and truly didn’t sign up for this. Some genuinely had trouble following the directions they were given and it wasn’t their fault.
Let’s Give Ourselves a Break
So yeah, modern school in America has a lot of shortcomings and perhaps traditions that are outdated. This post isn’t about school reform, that’s way too complicated and involved for a less than two thousand word article. But the pandemic has shown us that there are other possibilities besides classroom learning that could actually work. Perhaps we begin improving education by implementing the choices that the quarantine has forced us to consider: virtual schooling for those who want it; on site for some; homeschooling for others. Maybe a combination of the three.
And how about some different course offerings? Why can’t some schools provide accelerated curricula so their students are done by fourteen or so while others maintain a more traditional approach? Many larger school districts already partner with state or community colleges to allow interested kids to leave traditional high school after their sophomore years and move into special classes that both qualify them to graduate and earn college credits.
Creative solutions to improve education and fortify it against the possibility of future shutdowns require effort and oversight. Some people think there’s a single way to do education “right;” that we should just be able to send our kids to school and they’d come out all finished and grown up and wonderful. It will never work that way.
We’ve already started figuring out some pretty good alternatives. Let’s abandon the mindset that remote learning failed our kids during this pandemic (because it didn’t) and use that energy to further our experimentation with different approaches. All ideas are welcome.