The coronavirus pandemic has thrust us into the future in
some ways whether we like it or not. Forced to stay at home, even those of us
who might have been ambivalent about our phones or satellite/cable connections
or social media now depend on our technology much more than we had before. We
Zoom and Facetime with our families and friends, work at home, meet with our
doctors online, devour whatever is on Netflix or Prime Video, order food from
whatever app we can on our phones, buy anything and everything from Amazon to
deliver to our doors. Resistance is futile.
But the trend that the virus has accelerated at warp speed
is education, with classes from kindergarten to college being held online. The
problem is, as I’ve heard anecdotally from my just-graduated-from-high-school grandson,
his first-grade sister and their mother, and according to the evidence stacking
up from school districts around the country, online learning can be challenging
in a multitude of ways. Even for kids who are bright and self-motivated, it can
be boring. For kids who are struggling, it can be confusing and frustrating. For
those without Internet access, computers or workspace at home, it can be
impossible. And for teachers who have never learned to teach using the
technology, it can be the last straw.
According to an article in the Wall
Street Journal, the experiment to educate more than 50 million K-12
students online during lockdown this school year “just didn’t work.” Teachers found
the transition away from the classroom difficult, and students found the
transition from what they do every day on their phones, tablets and computers
for gaming and communication to what they have to do for school to be a lot
harder than anyone anticipated.
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| Ugh! So bo-o-o-ring! |
Part of it may be the way online classes are structured,
though that may vary widely from teacher to teacher, subject to subject, and
school system to school system. For example, my six-year-old granddaughter struggled
with most subjects online but loved the online math games. She had never
succeeded in math in a classroom setting. My grandson was a dedicated classroom
student in English and history and was also good at math and science. He
started online classes before lockdown as part of a special work/study
program to finish his high school degree. He found the classes tedious, the
equivalent, he said, of completing electronic worksheets. (I admit most work
training courses I’ve had to take online have been similar—and deadly boring.) Few
teachers have yet learned to really use the technology to advantage in getting
lessons across. Too often they’re just translating their lectures to video, which
lack even a human connection.
Many students nationwide complain that teachers give too
much work with their online classes. This, apparently, is a function of not
understanding fully how long it takes to complete a task on the computer, or
maybe just being too enthusiastic about the new technology. It’s clear many
assignments don’t take into account the circumstances many students find
themselves in—a distracting environment, sharing space and computers, parents
that may be working at home (or not home at all, due to work requirements), and
the need for individual attention from the teacher, which may or may not be
possible.
Some students do well with classes that are recorded for
playback at a later time, with teachers available at set times for questions. Other
students might never watch the recordings at all. Classes held on platforms
like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, with all the students present in a virtual
classroom setting have their own problems, according to one eighth-grader from
New York City in an opinion
piece in the New York Times. Not surprisingly, Veronique Mintz observes, the same teachers that “struggle to manage students in the classroom also
struggle online.”
In a suburb of Washington D.C., Fairfax County schools
have had problems with two separate online platforms, first the commonly-used
college system Blackboard, then, when students flooded that platform with obscene,
racist and homophobic messages, the newer Google “suite” of tools, including
Chat and Meet. Now students are receiving unwanted personal bullying
messages from Chat, presumably authored by their virtual classmates. The school
system’s IT staff are outclassed by the bullying students, who, according to Tim
Schaad, a Fairfax parent and cybersecurity specialist, “are running circles
around administrators.”
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| A chaotic classroom can happen even online. |
That’s a rich people’s problem, of course. Thornier
still is the problem of those many students who don’t have access to computers
or the Internet at all. A recent
story in USAToday relates how one mom saw a teenager sitting on the
curb outside a Subway in Starke, Florida with a Chromebook in his lap. She
turned her car around to check on him. Turns out he was using the restaurant’s
WiFi to do his homework. He had no Internet access at home. The article goes on
to detail the lengths to which the Jacksonville, Florida school district has
gone to provide computers and mobile hotspots to more than a third of its
110,000 students. Still, over 200 students remain without access.
Here in Madison County, in the mountains of Western
North Carolina, funds are not available for such an effort. While we’re still
in lockdown, kids can sit outside the library or in the parking lots of schools
if they don’t have Internet at home, and some computers have been made
available, but not nearly enough. So, like in years far past, the children of
Appalachia will be falling further behind the longer we remain in lockdown.
At least they can remain blissfully ignorant of the
cruelty their peers can deliver via Google Chat or the Comments section at “school.”
Virtually, Donna
*Information for this post provided from:
"The Results Are In For Remote Learning: It Didn't Work," by Tawnell D. Hobbs and Lee Hawkins, The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-coronavirus-remote-learning-lockdown-tech-11591375078
"Why I'm Learning More With Distance Learning Than I Do In School," by Veronique Mintz, The New York Times, May 5, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opinion/coronavirus-pandemic-distance-learning.html
Great blog, Donna, on a problem a lot of people may not even realize exists! I knew some kids (and their parents) were struggling with what is basically home schooling with tech assistance, but didn't realize the bullying issue was so enormous--and how these kids can stay two steps ahead of the teachers/supervisors because they understand the technology so much better. And then there were the issue with Zoom itself.
ReplyDeleteSadly, we probably won't know the full consequences of the lockdown for many months, or even years, to come.
Your blog did get my wheels turning about how kids might be schooled in space, though. Especially if their parents are spacefaring merchants or workers. Hmmm. Some definite food for thought there!
The teachers at my school have spent a lot of time analysing what teaching techniques resulted in the most engagement in order to give the optimum support to students. Sadly there will always be those who don't or won't engage, and a few that will not have the resources to access online learning (although the school has compensated for those with physical learning packs and phone calls for feedback). No system will ever work for everyone. The top students will still put all the work in. A lot of middle level students have found online teaching works better for them because they don't have the distraction of disruptive students, the pressure of performing in class in front of others, and better access to individual support. My introverted middle child is finding online learning better for him and his requirement to use a laptop in school obviously doesn't get him unwanted attention from the idiots who think it's funny to pick on anyone a bit different. More needs to be done for those disadvantaged and those who struggle with technology, but you will always get a proportion of students who never wanted to learn in the first place and the pandemic has given them the excuse to do even less but fortunately removed their bad behaviour from those students who actually do want to learn. Obviously it varies from school to school too - my youngest's school are doing an awesome job of keeping in touch with students and parents, whereas middle child's school hasn't contacted us once or given him feedback. Fortunately I'm in a position to offer educational support and extra resources, but I'm lucky.
ReplyDeleteFrom your experience, Pippa, the wide variety of online experience comes through. It really depends on the school, the teacher and, of course, the student and his or her parents. That's true of any classroom, but at least with traditional venues, we have years and years of history to draw on to figure out where we might be going wrong. (Not that some schools have made any use of all that history to design a meaningful educational experience.) I was always that parent who could offer the additional support and resources; I might struggle to do that now that most of the learning is online. It's just a new world, and not without its own dangers and pitfalls.
ReplyDeleteI think this is the way it was always going to move anyway. Our school has been trying to move to more online learning anyway - it saves a hella lot of money on photocopying and hard copy text books, and I'm surprised my job hasn't been superceeded by watching videos of experiments since they don't have to do an actual practical for exams any more - but obviously the pandemic has given it a shove. It has also highlighted how internet connections probably should be as much of a required service to all homes as water and power. I don't know whether the powers that be would see this as a way to potentially cut a lot of costs - not having to have or maintain actual school buildings and getting teachers to work from home would probably more than compensate for the need to supply laptops to poorer families, but since our government is apparently trying to return us to at least the 50s if not the Victorian era, I'm sure they'd rather not pay for schooling at all and put kids back to work.
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