Language skills, in particular learning to read and write. Which is a process that takes multiple years, but taking a year off right in the middle is just not going to work. And it’s not something that can be particularly taught online.
Do you have any evidence for that? I am not saying it’s ideal, by any means, but provided the kids are not then thrown in an environment where they are expected to perform at a higher level than they’ve been taught, I don’t see any reason why they can’t be caught up.
When you say “catch up”, do you mean just teach everything faster, add time to the school year or drop useless filler stuff that’s in the curriculum?
I mean that there’s a fair bit of redundancy and review built in, and that that time can be used to present new content instead of review. If school opens in fall, we only have about half a semester to make up. I think that will take 18 months to two years.
If we miss all of next semester or something, we’d need a more radical plan.
My biggest concern right now is that folks will settle into an opinion without having the solid science to support their opinion, and then will treat the opinion as part of their identity, defending it against new evidence as we learn more about the interaction between gatherings of children and spread of this disease. As this becomes increasingly politicized, we make increasingly poor decisions.
That horse hasn’t just left the barn – he’s joined up with like minded horses and colonized Mars.
You’re right, but I guess I’m encouraging folks here not to wear the team jersey just yet. By all means make some very preliminary observations–but be willing to change your mind given new evidence coming in, don’t marry yourself to one position.
So how crazily impossible would it be to start school a month or so earlier next year to try to make up?
Next year meaning in 2021? I don’t think it’s too crazy, if the pandemic is over. I think we might want to consider some year-round school schedules even (with a month summer vacation).
That said, I hope that it’ll be funded. If teachers are asked to work for an extra month, I hope it’s not on a volunteer basis. Lots of teachers work summer jobs to cover income loss.
NC schools are considering adding extra days to the calendar by removing workdays. This is not a great plan, and was probably created by someone who doesn’t know how precious workdays are for planning, grading, and other administrative tasks.
This is one of the plans the district my kid attends has. They are making multiple plans, from continuing with complete remote education to fully open schools with enhanced sanitation and other things.
The first step up from fully remote is that most students will be remote, but that students who can’t do remote learning will be allowed to attend school in small groups. The goal is to attempt to prevent those students from being completely left behind. Who exactly will be eligible is a different discussion.
The district did send out a survey. It was basically a single questions: If we open up schools in some capacity and you are allowed to send your kids, will you send your kids?
I also think the discussion about kids being left behind and vital learning opportunities being missed is a bit overblown. Kids are extremely resilient, and all over the country kids are going to be behind similarly. Obviously this is going to increase the variance between the top kids and the lowest kids, but for most kids they’ll either be caught up, or working within a system that is expecting them to be behind and compensating. For example, learning long division in 4th grade instead of 3rd (or whatever the grades are taught in) will just be the new normal. Will the kids that would have been ready for AP calculus in high school still be ready for it in 6-8 years? Probably.
Kids will be older and more mature the first time they see new concepts, which in many cases will help. For the things like socialization that is being missed out on, there are other helpful things like free play that kids are getting more of.
At least in my district, and my kid’s school, grade, and class, they didn’t get very behind despite remote learning for the last two months. The math lessons went through the end of the workbook, language learning went to the end units for first grade. Social studies and history covered several topics. Did they miss some things? Certainly. Did the keep up on the fundamentals? Yes.
Very much this. I’m pretty agnostic, because we really don’t know what the science tells us. There are so many layers to this, so many trade-offs.
For some portion the one time through was what they needed to master the material well enough to move on to new content that sometimes requires that mastery of skills and material that have come before. Tell them once and they get it, retain it, and can use it in different contexts later.
But for many others? The redundancy and review is there for a reason, and I know you know this. Repeated exposure to material and using skills in a variety of contexts is a basic education approach. Many kids won’t have enough mastery to move on without it. Trying to build the next floor without the foundation, without the next floor having its support beams in place, is not going to get anything useful built.
That’s not what I am saying. As I’ve said several times, with the missed time, we will have to restructure things for the whole cohort and it will take time to catch them up . . .I’d guess a couple years to make up the 12 weeks we lost. But the redundancy and review already baked in makes that possible, especially for the younger kids.
Still no new surges in the countries that have opened schools. Is It Safe to Reopen Schools? These Countries Say Yes - WSJ
My wife the schoolteacher has come to the conclusion that it is impossible to make schools safe by this fall, and she’s just about to refuse to go back if they do open.
She’s basically freaking out about the situation.
I think our primary schools opened the 11th of may (Netherlands). No rise in cases yet. I think today had the best numbers since early March.
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Thank you for this. Here is more information.
Schools will certainly not be immune. Individual schools will have cases and need to dealt with appropriately when they occur. A super-spreader teacher behaving poorly (and other teachers also behaving badly) can/will spread to other adults and to children.
In a case like this one hopes for several things:
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That the Israelis do not waste the rare opportunity like the Swedes did (as linked to earlier in this thread). They don’t seem as if they are but study of the cluster is in progress. What is the primary directionality of the spread? How contagious were children who caught it? Did it vary by age? How many tested positive but were asymptomatic? These are critical things to pin down and the number of cases in schools have been so few (thankfully) that they are near complete unknowns.
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That best practices (and not-best ones) can be highlighted.
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That no one gets seriously ill.
Preliminary information is that it was an adult super-spreader who failed to engage in any of the recommended best practices who was the prime source of spread, but that some spread by High School students may also have occurred. Possibly some spread by middle school aged as well but not yet clear.
As a result of the case mentioned above, yesterday my son’s Tel Aviv middle school decided to go back to studying from home at least until next week, purely as a precaution.
Twelve students from Denmark spent a holiday in Sweden. Five of them got coronavirus, leading the school to cancel classes for the first grade and move to remote education for a couple weeks.