It Might've Been The Best We Could Do On The Fly

I doubt that any of us expected, back when school started last year, that we'd shut the schools down for a third of the school year.  I doubt teachers expected that they'd be teaching from their living rooms, and I doubt kids and parents thought they'd be home all day.  What's happened this school year has certainly been unprecedented.

The transfer of education delivery from in-person to online was haphazard at best, and maybe it was done about as well as could have been expected given that no one had ever even planned for such an event.  The smart people told us the world was ending and we had to change everything, so we did.

Despite all we've learned about the coronavirus since then, though, too many people are still acting as if it's mid-March and the world is still on the brink of a pandemic.  Plans are being made to open schools only partially, if at all, after summer break.

I'm tired of my kitchen table having to serve as my classroom.  To be blunt, distance teaching isn't what I signed up for, certainly not from my house.

Turns out distance learning has not been great for students, either (surprise, surprise):

Children are getting much less learning time — three hours a day for most,  two hours a day for students who attended high-poverty schools — since schools switched to remote instruction, reports an Education Week survey of teachers...

Teachers are spending less time presenting new material, more time reviewing and troubleshooting technology, they said. Not surprisingly, student engagement is down...

Remote learning is such a failure that school ended in March for most students, writes economist Susan Dynarski in the New York Times. For “the vast majority of students, online learning and work sheets are no substitute for trained teachers in classrooms.”

You know what else isn't great for students?  Handing out passing grades like cookies, because "student grades shouldn't be adversely affected by the shutdowns."  If, like me, you think grades should measure some sort of achievement towards academic content standards, such a comment mortifies you.  On the other hand, if you see grades as rewards, or as commodities to be given or withheld at whim, then that comment probably makes sense in your world.  When states and districts tell teachers what grades they must give, you see the full folly of the modern public school system.