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Let’s talk about online school.
Teachers and school administrators were given an impossible problem to teach online school with no training or scientific basis or time to develop tools or support systems for children.
It is really, really not going well.*
* at least for the children who aren’t yet more responsible and self-sufficient than most adults.
* at least for the children who aren’t yet more responsible and self-sufficient than most adults.
I’m sure there was push-back, but we’re all trapped in a Capitalist hellscape, so any contemplation of refusal is accompanied by an absolutely real fear of being this person because the entire nature of “working for a living” means if you aren’t working… you aren’t living.
One daughter is a High School Senior that is bravely trudging through the turd being served her while simultaneously mourning the fact that she is being denied all of the culturally promised milestones associated with this part of her life.
How many movies about prom or High School life have *you* seen in your lifetime? How many of you think back on your senior year and think about friends, relationships, dates, sports, school plays, choir…?
Schools are acting as if they are trying to produce a seasonal livestock that’s no different than any other year, stamped with grade certifications that bear little relationship to reality on a typical year. This year it’s farcical.
Of my three children, two are in different high schools and one is in middle school—all in the same school district. One HS is doing 4 classes per term, the other 8. The middle school is doing 6.
None of the schools are on the same page about technique or standards or pacing or mechanism, nor do the schools seem to talk to each other. All are assigning more work than reasonable, at the very least wholly disconnected with actual education versus trying to meet standards.
Of these 18 classes, 17 use Canvas to coordinate and 1 uses Google Classroom. That’s probably the most consistent tool selection we have to deal with, and even that means that we’re always forgetting about that one class.
Each class then has free reign to select online software to use to implement their curriculum. How many EULAs has your child had to accept in order to do the work assigned to them on the 321 random online tools being selected by each teacher? What was in them? NOBODY KNOWS!
Likewise, you would be shocked to see how many advertisements are shown to your child in the course of each school day.
We’ve given up on the attendance game for the child with 8 classes. It’s a complete joke; she is expected to “attend” 4 to 8 classes per day (different each day and up to her to remember, as opposed to the middle school which uses the built-in calendar in Canvas).
Attendance is kept by the teachers however the teachers see fit. Naturally, this means 8 different ways. One has a spreadsheet the kids enter their names in. One has them join the office hours on Google Meet and type ‘here’ into the chat.
Another asks them to reply to an announcement they post for that class period. (Periods for that class+teacher are in the same ‘Canvas’ page, so they also get attendance announcements for the other class periods that don’t apply to them to manually filter out.)
I will spare you the five other classes.
We get daily calls from the district attendance line to report our children being marked absent—as if I wasn’t spending every morning (‘synchronous’ time) making sure they have what they need, food & drink, are where they are supposed to be, and doing videocall/wifi support.
Side note—our family would be failing all the harder if I was working right now. How are people who don’t live in big houses with gigabit fiber even supposed to find five sufficiently acoustically isolated rooms and support five simultaneous videoconferences?
My heart goes out to those that are doing this with no full-time adult to help every day.
Speaking of attendance, today one daughter was 4 minutes late to class and ended up waiting over 50 minutes before the instructor realized an attendee was waiting to join the Zoom call. How is one supposed to get the teacher's attention when you’re locked out of the classroom?
The schools were given an impossible problem and passed the impossible problem to the kids because of real personal risk if they refused.
Our kids are being graded for not living up to standards defined around other teaching methods for times when they aren’t personally dealing with the realities of pandemics and fascism and police brutality and murderous systemic racism and an atmosphere of toxicity (AQI >600) and
NEVER ACTUALLY GETTING TO SEE OTHER CHILDREN THEIR AGES IN PERSON.
We don’t individually have the agency to fix any of these things, even collectively it would take great effort. It’s cowardly, however, to pass the problem to our children. Unfortunately, this simply seems to be the American way.
In a Capitalist system, the money moves up and effort, burden, and consequences move down. Our children are at the bottom of this ladder and we are crushing them.
I don’t think in-person school is the answer right now. Denial (from government to individual) and refusal of personal responsibility is exactly why we can’t get out from under this pandemic.
What should be done? People need to stand up and push back when given impossible problems. When it comes to educating our children, the goal should be EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN, not individually avoiding being yet another casualty of Capitalism. This is why we must work together.
I want to think that teachers’ hearts are in the right place but feel their hands are tied. If they want to push back, I wholly support them. If school administrators want to push back, I wholly support them. If children want to refuse to put up with this, I wholly support them.
Instead of educating and supporting the development of our children, we are feeding them garbage and telling them if they don’t eat it “THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES.”
As if the consequences of not being peer-comparable to the cohorts of children from previous years could be any worse than their lives in 2020, imprisoned in their own rooms all day staring at screens, with palpable and real fears for their safety whenever they leave the house.
