It’s remotely education
7 ways in which online education isn’t really education
Okay everybody, let’s hear it for the class of 2020! Hey wait, where did everybody go? Talk about an entire class of high school and college graduates going gently into their goodnights. Neil Young once sang that it’s better to burn out than to fade away, and I’m starting to agree. (For what it’s worth, he also said: “Shelter me from the powder and the finger,” so he may not be the last word when it comes to mantras for life.)
The 2020 school year came to a merciful conclusion a couple of weeks ago, and I believe in the end, relief replaced disappointment for those who would take their final walk across the stage. The shock and disappointment that impacted every student in New York State, but especially those who were looking forward to the time honored traditions that make being either a high school senior or a college senior typically one of the highlights of one’s adolescent years was finally complete. COVID-19, as it did to so many traditions and institutions, took a wrecking ball to those time-honored traditions, and so whether you graduated high school or college in 2020, you certainly were going to have some story to tell your children and grandchildren. “Hey kids, did I ever tell you about the time that I survived the year without a year?”
My school district like so many had to really think outside the box in order to give our senior class the send off that they deserved. Enter the drive-in movie theater. The district did a great job of making the seniors feel special, and the drive-in turned out to be a great idea. A word of caution though. Most of the things that people have traditionally enjoyed at the drive-in including showing up in your pajamas, sneaking your friends in while they hide in the trunk, and making out during the movie are frowned upon when the drive-in is used for graduations. (Rensselaer City School District)
Rensselaer High School where I teach is a rather small district, usually graduating only about 50 or 60 students a year. This means that despite the fact that social distancing upended almost any attempt at creating a sense of normalcy at graduation, we still had some flexibility due to our relatively small size to put together a program that allowed individual recognition for the class of 2020. Shenendehowa High School where my children graduated from several years ago, averages around 750 or more graduates in any given year. This is a much more Herculean challenge for the district to make the students still feel special while honoring social distancing.
At Rensselaer, the district allowed each student to drive up to the school, get out of their cars, and receive their diplomas, and then when that was completed, they paraded in their cars throughout the city before finally settling at the Jericho Drive-in Movie Theater where all of the speeches and awards which had been previously recorded were presented. The process concluded with an impressive fireworks display, and it appeared that most parents as well as 2020 graduates left satisfied. Some have suggested this may have even been an improvement over the usual process. Either way, it was good to see how a little ingenuity could be accessed to turn a potential disappointment into a positive experience for the students.
For Shenendehowa, where the student body contains more people than than almost any city in Wyoming, students showed up in small groups every hour on the hour. The process lasted over 12 hours, which even by Shen graduation standards is pretty lengthy. My hats off to the administrators who organized and participated in this marathon like event. (And people wonder why I didn’t go into administration?) I don’t want to suggest that perhaps Shen has gotten too large, but unbeknownst to most involved, the entire graduating class of Heatly High School, all 12 of them, actually snuck into Shen’s graduation and were able to receive diplomas posing as Shen students. They might have gotten away with it too, but the jig was blown when one of the faux Plainsmen claiming to be the valedictorian was exposed due to the fact that they couldn’t spell Shenendehowa correctly or explain without stumbling into political incorrectness exactly what a “Plainsman” is.
I of course felt terrible for all of the high school and college seniors, especially my own son who missed out on his graduation ceremony. However, in another time and in another place, my wife and I along with my youngest son attended my other son’s graduation from SUNY Cortland a few years ago. The graduation ceremony was quite lengthy, it was freezing out, there was a guest speaker who was booed by those who didn’t agree with her assessment that global warming was a “thing,” and then, just as my son was going to finally have his name called, Senator Chuck Schumer showed up to give a speech about something that I was too cold to care about. Maybe eliminating traditional graduation ceremonies could be one of the few positives that comes out of COVID-19? (Hoffman Collection)
While many schools were able to transform graduation from another lost tradition courtesy of the coronavirus to an event that students were able to savor, the actual process of educating students was not quite the success story that many in the media would have you believe. Yes many teachers did their best to engage with the students, and yes many students continued to work hard to maintain their grades and attempt to immerse themselves in the learning process, but this idea that remote learning should be considered as some sort of new wave in the education process as Governor Andrew Cuomo attempted to promote at one point during the quarantine was as nonsensical as Texas and Florida somehow thinking you could just go back to normal and nobody would get sick. Thanks to COVID-19, the 2019–2020 school year came to a screeching halt. With little more than a day’s notice, the entire education structure of the state was turned on its ear. Good luck everybody!
There are many issues regarding why remote learning is problematic, and almost none of them have anything to do with effort, be it the effort of the teacher, or the effort of the students. It is far more systemic than that. Let’s be honest, as a teacher, I can tell you with great confidence that there isn’t a group of professionals on the planet more averse to change than teachers. Remember, we are essentially the one group of professionals whose goal is to find a job right out of college, stay at that job in that location, in that subject matter, for the next 30 years. Any changes that are put forth, be it in standardized testing, assessment, curriculum, or even in the bell schedule is enough to send most teachers running for their Xanax. (In truth it’s more likely to be a fine “boxed wine” or whatever is on sale in the beer section of their local distributor, we are but humble civil servants you know.)Now, with literally no advanced warning, we were being instructed to change everything about the way we did things for our entire career.
That sickly look on this young educator’s face isn’t from morning sickness. She just found out that the bell schedule changed by five minutes in her school building, and she’s not sure if she can handle this drastic change. Such is the makeup of teachers (New York Times)
While it may seem as if the idea of remote education is not only plausible, but quite possibly due to cost, pandemics, as well as the fact that more and more children do learn better in non-traditional classrooms, preferable, the idea and implementation are often at odds in this world. Communism famously looks great on the blackboard, but not so much when you have to live under its stifling yoke, and have to wait three weeks for the next shipment of toilet paper to arrive via the central planning board and the commissar for the “Tuchus Cleansing Commission.” The actual practice of virtual learning in the so-called virtual classroom, as well as its ancillary effects turn out to be quite formidable when actually put into effect.
Here are just a few of the somewhat insurmountable issues that arise from remote learning:
- Not every child has a computer — Yes, not everybody teaches at the school where the characters from Beverly Hills 90210, including 32 year old Dylan McKay attended. Several of my students did their work on their phones. However, to my school’s credit, not only did they make laptops available to those who asked, but next year nearly every student in the district will have one. There’s only one small problem.
- Not every child has internet access — Spectrum offered free wifi during the pandemic, but if we were to go out next year, or even if we attempt to implement some sort of hybrid where some students attend school while others attempt to learn from home, internet access could become a real conundrum.
- Ever run a class on Zoom? — Yes, modern technology is incredible, but please let me know if I’ve somehow missed out on the technology that demands that students keep their cameras on, because until that software is developed, it’s a problem. Look, it’s hard enough to teach children today with the evil distractions provided by the iPhone. Now try to keep students from being distracted by their phone when they actually need their iPhone to participate in the class. One student told me that when they were on Zoom with another teacher, they turned off their camera and began watching Netflix on their computer. Good luck competing with that.
- Students be sleepy — I started my classes at 11 o’clock believing that it was reasonable to expect my students who are 11th and 12th graders to be up by that time. It would appear I was mistaken. Since students didn’t have to discipline themselves to get up and go to school at 7:30 during quarantine, they could stay up late, very late. Yes, sometimes they were up watching Tik Tok videos until four in the morning, but sometimes they were up doing work. If I had a dime for everytime a student emailed me an assignment between 12 midnight and four in the morning, I’d have a lot of dimes.
- Who’s watching the children??? — Seriously, who? I teach the older students, but what if you had a 3rd or 4th grader, and you had to work? What then? As you can see, COVID-19 not only disproportionately affected the health of the poor, but it has also wreaked havoc on the poor financially. Not only have the the jobs of the working poor been amongst the hardest hit during the pandemic, but many times these are single parent households who depend upon the schools to serve as a form of baby-sitting so they can go to work. This doesn’t even take into account most people’s ability to even help their children do their work since the teacher’s impact has been so minimalized. Ever try to do, much less teach the math that is taught today? Good luck with that, particularly when the student’s time with the teacher has been cut down dramatically.
- “Mr. Hoffman, we couldn’t hear you.” — I tried both Zoom as well as Google Meet and too often the students would say that they couldn’t hear me, or I would have trouble hearing them. The technology has its limits as it is when it comes to educating, the last thing we needed was for them to not be able to hear me, or vice versa.
- “Hi, nice to meet you kids….virtually.” — It was one thing to make the adjustment to virtual teaching with students I already had made connections with, but how does one proceed to establish these relationships when they’ve never even met these students before? Again, I teach the older kids so it’s not quite as difficult, but trying to make connections with students in the primary grades or middle school is going to be quite the challenge when your first encounter with them is going to be done on-line. Therefore it is imperative that we at least begin the fall session in the school building, and then if we are put out again, at least we will have established some relationship with the students.
(This was supposed to be some sort of dystopian vision of the future when George Orwell wrote his classic novel about what the world might look like in 1984. Now, this is what we call “virtual physical education class.” You Tube)
Seemingly as it is with every other issue in our society, those students who come from poor or disadvantaged homes, or homes that aren’t “safe,” are of course facing an entirely different form of discrimination through their attempts to do their schoolwork and remain competitive. In many respects, the efforts of educators as well as their students are more impressive than ever. In my experiences, teaching online means that we as teachers were really fulfilling the role of “counselor.” Virtual teaching involves much more listening and patience than regular classroom teaching. For many of my seniors in particular, I found it had become my job to be supportive and guide them through what was proving to be a most disappointing senior year, and reminding them that better times lay ahead. I felt I could best serve my students by making our “Zoom” classroom sessions as fun as possible. Students needed teachers to be a presence in their lives during times like this, and I’m not sure a discussion of the New Deal was the best way in which I could serve them.
Of course some education had to take place, and this posed huge issues as well. Every assignment that was emailed to me typically needed some corrections since I wasn’t there with them to explain everything. Therefore I had to write out on pretty much every assignment that was completed, a lengthy explanation accompanied by several addendums to ensure that they were understanding everything they needed to know for a particular lesson, and this was time-consuming to say the least. For elementary school teachers, there was even more of a challenge. Not only were they dealing with students who were scared, confused, and feeling out of sorts, some of these children may have found themselves living with a parent, or parents who were frustrated, angry, out-of-work, and not wanting to or able to deal with their children who were now home all of the time.
They say that one of the downsides of Zoom is that it is very susceptible to hackers, something that the Chinese apparently have been attempting to do. I’m not sure what they hope to learn from my classes, but like myself, they may be shocked to learn about all of the snacks that students keep under their beds. (pixabay, labeled for reuse)
As Dr. Malcolm stated in the first Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.” Teachers and students will continue to evolve and learn how best to fulfill their roles if our lives in lockdown continue. I’m not sure there’s a truly safe way to open the schools come September. On the other hand, I’m not sure New York City, and everywhere else can continue to keep their students at home. Think of the skills that are not being developed, the daycare nightmare for so many parents, and the impact that the lack of socializing does to children. On the other hand, can we risk the well-being of society by opening up? Good luck keeping 2nd and 3rd graders hands to themselves. How will the schools administer the cafeteria, physical education class, chorus, and extra-curriculars including sports? I fear there may be a few more butterflies in the tum-tum this Labor Day than usual.