Tag: remote learning

What a Waste!

Looking back at some of my most recent posts, it sounds like saner heads were prevailing, but alas, the sanity was short-lived. From the moment we headed back to school this fall, the push to send us back into the classrooms turned up the pressure exponentially. What surprised me was the direction from which the push came: administration.

I had hopes, at first, when the COVID-19 numbers began to rise last August and our board members voted to delay the start of school and then start remotely when we did begin. Whoever was in charge of the district calendar did an excellent job in reworking it so that all of our PD (professional development) days were moved to the three weeks during which school was postponed. It gave the teachers days to “prepare” (if only they would actually leave us alone and let us do exactly that instead of tying up our time in meetings) and kept our school year from having to be lengthened. It was brilliant.

The only problem with this seemingly good plan was the quality of the PD. It didn’t really help us with the problems the teachers were facing, and in the end, turned out to be a huge waste of time. For example, we were told if we were going to begin the year remotely, our school needed to have a website presence on Google sites, and each teacher was supposed to develop his/her own page for students to use remotely. Almost none of us had experience with the Google sites program and how it worked, and we were given no instruction in its use. None. No joke. Instead, we were told to “go play with it.” The theory being that we would learn much more through our own exploration than by being shown. (I wonder what kind of evaluations WE would get if we just simply told our students “go play with it” and expect them to learn on their own.)

Having spent a few hours in frustration and not having those hours to spare, my grade level cohort and I went to our instructional specialist, who is our technology guru, and begged for some pointers to get us started. With just a few minutes of demonstration, I was actually excited and felt equipped now to tackle the assignment set out for us. I spent days, yes, entire days, as in a spare hour or two during the day that I wasn’t scheduled in some worthless meeting, plus evening hours and all weekend, designing and building my website. I made buttons that served as links to my Webex meeting room within a clearly-laid out schedule for my students to follow every day.

(Oh, yes, I don’t believe I’ve told you yet.) You know how there was this huge push to get the teachers to learn Zoom last spring? Not only did we have to learn how to be a participant, we had to know how to run the meetings, control our students’ behavior on it and teach them to properly use Zoom’s tools, as well as help our parents trouble-shoot. Well, just as everyone gets fairly proficient with Zoom, our school district decides to dump it and change to Webex. All of that learning was thrown out the window, and we’re all having to learn Webex, which doesn’t work like Zoom, as well as Google sites, on top of everything else.

Anyhow, I was incredibly proud of my website. I was a little uneasy because I was wondering what’s to keep someone “off the street” from entering our website and crashing our meetings. However, I just followed orders, and I was told to post my personal Webex meeting room link clearly on my site for my parents to see and use. I secretly wondered if I’m the only one who sees the irony in the fact that we dumped Zoom because of “security problems,” which were actually our own fault by publishing the links and passwords to our meetings in a public place, and now we were even more publicly sharing our Webex links. Was I the only one to see a problem with this? Apparently so. I continued to build my site incorporating all the items my administration required: a contact page with my link big and bold, a weekly newsletter, a list of tasks to be completed, and the learning objectives for the week’s lessons. It was a beautiful sight to behold, if I do say so myself. I figured out a way to create separate links for my small reading and math groups so that they wouldn’t drop in on each other’s meetings, and I had them all hidden behind labeled buttons to make things as easy as possible for my students and parents. I was the very proud parent of my baby Google site, especially since the labor to give birth to it was hard and long.

We launched our sites, spent a few days in parent-teacher conferences demonstrating our sites to our parents, and it wasn’t until that moment the our school district administration decided “Oops! This wasn’t as secure as we thought it would be. In fact, you need to take it all down right now.” Days and days of work made completely worthless in an instant, and it all could have been avoided with just a little forethought and planning.

I knew before my principal did. I read the directive in the district’s daily bulletin that morning and pulled my Webex links off immediately in order to protect them. I later even taught myself how to go into Webex and change the actual link just to be sure no one could enter my personal meeting room using the previously published link. To add insult to injury, my principal chose that morning to do an unannounced “walk-through” observation of my site and my morning meeting with my students. The only thing she could find to criticize was the fact that my Webex link wasn’t published anywhere. I informed her that I had had it there minutes before she browsed my site, and I would be happy to put it up again if that’s what she wanted, but there was this article in the daily bulletin she needed to see that said to take it down. A few minutes later a memo was sent by her to the entire school to take the Webex references down, requiring interactive sites like mine to be dismantled.

This is just one of many instances I could cite that show the lack of planning, foresight, communication, and consideration of our district’s administration.

This Is Why

I was in Target today, and I saw a mother of three young children, the oldest looked about ready to enter second grade at most. She was pushing her cart through the store, the two older boys walking nearby with the youngest, a girl, sitting in the cart. All three children dutifully had their masks on, each a different style. The oldest had a no-nonsense, disposable, nondescript mask, the middle a black cloth mask with a superhero logo, and the youngest a pink sparkly sequined mask. None of the children were fussing with their masks. They just seemed to accept them as much as they accepted the clothing they were wearing. They were simply a necessary part of their outfit when they are out in public.

Kudos to that mom!!! She has obviously spent some time and effort training her children about the importance and necessity of wearing personal protective equipment in this COVID-19 riddled world. She made me start to question some of my strongly-held personal beliefs about the ability of my students to follow the CDC guidelines regarding social distancing, hand washing, and mask wearing. Maybe I’d been too hasty. Maybe I’d not given the children or their parents enough credit. Maybe it WOULD be possible to have a group of twenty first graders in a classroom for eight hours per day, five days a week, follow protocol and learn safely in a deadly virus-infested world.

A few minutes later, I was checking out my purchases at the register. I heard them before I could see them: a handful of unmuffled children’s voices, one taunting another and apparently successful, based on the full-throated scream that followed. Curious about the clarity of their voices, I shifted my position slightly to get a better look at the children making the ruckus.

Another masked mom was pushing her shopping cart, surrounded by her three small children, the oldest of whom was probably entering first grade, the youngest toddling next to the shopping cart with its pacifier dangling from its mouth, barely able to keep up. All three were out of control, touching everything in sight. The one thing that was no where to be seen…a mask.

In that moment, all the doubt, the recrimination, the reconsideration I had been giving to my views about the age-appropriateness of expecting my students to wear masks all day long just flew out the window. I was right. I’d been right all along. It’s too much to expect of them, too much to ask. I just happened to catch that first mom at a good point in time. I’d lay bets that even her kids, at some other point, had given her fits and refused to wear the PPE.

Does that mean that the first mom shouldn’t bother to teach her children to mask up? Of course not! I still give her kudos, and she should still continue the good work she’s been doing, because it’s the right thing to do. It’s keeping her family healthy. It’s keeping me healthy. It’s keeping you healthy. It’s helping starve the virus from devouring its next victim. It’s bringing the virus under control more quickly than it would be otherwise.

But if you’re one of those people demanding that schools reopen immediately, despite the ever-rising numbers of new COVID-19 cases being reported daily, and you’re demanding to know why they aren’t, this is why. Even if you could reasonably expect six-year-old children to keep their uncomfortable mask on all the time and to always remember to never approach their friends closer than six feet (and you can’t), you can never count on all parents teaching their children to wear their masks, even when they don’t want to, and to keep their distance from other people, and to do the right thing because it’s the right thing, especially when it is inconvenient or uncomfortable, to think of the good of other people and maybe, once in a while, even put other’s needs above their own.

Unless parents are willing to do the hard work of parenting, and it IS hard work, I know, children will NEVER learn these behaviors. Students can’t be expected to magically start to exhibit these behaviors at school if parents have not first taught them at home.