Basically around here the kids 3rd quarter grade will be their semester grade and if they want to do work, they can some extra credit and raise it but they dont have to so essentially school is over.
Its interesting for say PE teachers putting out “Lessons” like telling kids they should so do many pushups and such a day.
Art teachers are having kids use stuff from around the house like old cereal boxes to make things.
I’m thinking when this is thru they should just set aside classes to let students just keep doing this if they wish. Sort of how college courses can now be taken online.
It makes for less stress than in the actual school and many kids actually do better this way.
I can only speak for my school district.
From the academic side, the one big problem is student/parent motivation. We have one 8th grade teacher whose normal class is 30, but who has only 8 students, give or take, on any given day. The primary grades are doing better, running at about 50% attendance. It appears that, the older the kids get, the more stubborn they get and the more battle weary the parents.
From the tech side, I’m able to do all of that support from home because it involves all the things I can reach on line: Powerschool, the Clever Portal, Google Accounts, etc. The issues I deal with are connectivity issues.
As of yesterday, I have returned to work from 8 to noon, with the rest of my time spent at home. There are things that have to be done here in preparation for what will hopefully be the '20-'21 school year. The building has been empty for 5 weeks, and there are only about 8 of us who have been called back, so I feel safe here. It’s certainly much safer than walking into a market, mask or no mask.
When Governor DeWine originally closed the schools in Ohio, he reassured everyone that it would be no disruption, because it would be just like an extended spring break. When he then extended the closure indefinitely, he reassured everyone that it would be no disruption, because every single student in the state was getting just as good an education online as they could have at school.
These kids are never going to recover from the deficit in their educations. We’re going to be feeling the effects for decades. Which is probably why the CDC recommended against widespread school closures.
Implicit in the CDC recommendations was the assumption that testing was available. Saying “Only close schools when there has been a diagnosed case” is a meaningless statement when you literally can’t get tested unless you are in the hospital, and maybe not even then. I knew probably half a dozen people in my school with COVID like symptoms before we closed. None could get tested. I imagine there were dozens more I didn’t know about. I think the chances were pretty good that at least one of them had it, but there was literally no way to know.
I am about as passionate about the importance of education as anyone I know, and I don’t think that it will take “decades” to recover from this. I think it will take 3-5 years for a lot of kids to completely catch up, but that’s okay. We can do that. There’s honestly a lot of slack built into the system. I am honestly so much more worried about the kids we’ve locked in with abusive families, but I don’t know what to do about that. We needed to have been doing better to offer those kids support before this happened.
One major system is closing up shop early
The Switch to Online Education - How is going?
Iz gewd. How iz going with you?
My 8th grader seemed to take to it quickly. Kids were offered Chromebooks if needed but most kids already had access to a computer already.
They interact with their teachers through something called Google Classroom which he was already familiar with since they use it a lot on a normal basis.
I can also monitor his grades/assignments/scores and communicate with his teachers through ParentVUE while he uses StudentVUE.
He’s an only kid and while I am still able to commute to work my wife is working from home in a makeshift office on one side of the house while he gets the kitchen table to himself.
I’m questioning the workload and still hope it increases as he starts each day at 9am and is finished by 1pm for 7 classes.
I asked him what is the most difficult class to do distance learning through and he said it was Honors Geometry since he couldn’t get immediate clarification on how to do something if he had questions or watch the teacher clarify something for another student.
For what it’s worth, we are getting about equal complaints about too much work and not enough. So you can’t make everyone happy. And lots of kids don’t have a quiet house and a kitchen table to themselves: they are watching younger siblings and sometimes working a lot.
Even then, I think 4 hours, assuming he’s a pretty bright kid, is honestly a lot. If it takes him 4 hours in a calm, controlled environment, how long do you think it takes the slowest 25% of kids in his class? How long for a kid who is in charge of 2 elementary students at the same time?
Some of my professors say they are planning to conduct the exams in person and do not want to make an online assessment. I am wondering what we are going to do if they say we have to wear masks during the exam. I just can’t breath with the mask properly.