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I am happy I’m not having to teach (technically GSI) right now. The schooling issue is tough… I feel that too many people were willing to give up on in person instruction. Students need it.
From your post I gather that not only does this strain strategies for teaching, a lot of students (high-school?) are struggling with their lessons because of the changing environment and it is sad. It’s a really tough spot and everything you said is very thoughtful but this hybrid stuff– it isn”t a silver bullet and it has real costs.
I don’t even know what the strategy should be, especially if it is high-school. College students we should be tough on. But high-schoolers…they probably really don’t know.
One cool experience I had was when a teacher assigned us to groups for the entire semester. We were simply forced to work together. I think it made in person or remote largely irrelevant, since we were always communicating. I don’t know how it translates to hybrid learning but if students know they have a working group, it seems to at least get them talking. I tried to put students in groups every section and that seemed to marginally increase the number of people who raised their hands.
Some of the children might be living with vulnerable relatives at home. Minimizing external contact might make sense then, though I have also heard that there is very little chance of a child infecting an adult and vice versa.
I was going to try hybrid for my kids to minimize their time with masks on their faces, but ultimately it wasn’t worth it.
I wanted to homeschool but that hasn’t been a viable option without my husband’s support.
One of the headaches of last year’s remote learning was having assignments scattered, poor organization, and ensuring all the work was properly submitted. Some assignments didn’t get done because we never found them. Homeschooling doesn’t require being responsible to a third party for assignments, which ultimately (for me, as a parent) was the biggest stressor.
There’s nothing wrong with student led materials for older students. A great many homeschooled kids proceed quite well with reading materials, worksheets, and assignments. There’s so many online materials for extra help that a parent wouldn’t even need to be involved. The upside is that they aren’t necessarily spending 8 hours watching classroom videos, which may help with the depression part as it frees them to pursue other interests and hobbies.
Anyway, the lack of something along those lines and the over complexity of it just turned me off. After 1 week of “hybrid”, I sent them all out the door full time and am happy I did. My oldest still has virtual assignments, but it’s less chaotic than last year. A lot of hybrid parents in our area did the same.
There is no silver bullet with hybrid, you’re right. A salient point was made by a science teacher who said she told admin that a fully online environment has a very specific setup and the buy-in from the students and teacher is different from the get-go. You don’t get that from our variety of hybrid which is shifting from day-to-day with teachers who are constantly stressed. I’ve done fully online classes before and she’s right. It can be a solitary learning environment, but you have to understand that in advance so you have the resources to deal with it and really make the most of it. I wonder to what extent other teachers notice this in their hybrid classes too.
That’s absolutely possible. While I really don’t want to tell kids what to do in their downtime, knowing that certain remote kids have been socializing is worrisome. Staying at home for health reasons makes sense, but we shouldn’t be hearing about them getting together for parties.
Finding assignments is a headache for everyone this year. Every single teacher seems to use a different technology to assign work (OneNote, PowerSchool, GoogleDocs, turnitin, FlipGrid, etc) and students are looking everywhere to find their assignments. The special ed teachers were telling me that they are trying to figure out 1)how to use all the programs teachers are adopting to help the students and 2)how to find all the assignments because they have to record all of them for their parents in a recap email at the end of the week. Turning in work has been equally tricky because of file formatting, etc.
You’re absolutely right that the depression comes with watching all those sketchily-filmed classroom videos for 8 hours. Your kids are lucky you sent them out the door! how old are your children? Homeschooling sounds better and better…
When you consider that this virus has had nearly no impact on young healthy kids, all the things you are doing seems insane.
Eleven, 8, and 5. My oldest started middle school this year.
You bring up something else- room cleanings between classes. Between classes we have to disinfect every chair and desk used in addition to getting ready for the next class. There are 20 min passing periods to do it but it’s tough with kids who want extra help after class, plus loose ends to tie up with the remote kids online. Teachers who share rooms don’t have their own cleaning kit so the four maintenance workers race around the building and do it. And yes, to loop back to your point, this virus has had nearly no impact on healthy kids.
In a school district about 25 miles from us (a town smaller than ours) so many students who had opted for “distance learning” are currently failing and/or completely unengaged that the district has ordered those students to come in for in-person learning unless there is a specific medical reason they shouldn’t.
That’s interesting and courageous. The complete disengagement is something many students freely admit to.
I did a hybrid class where it was run mainly out of UNC and we had an instructor in our room and even my attention wained. Also I realized I didn’t care that much about census data. I do think students probably need a way to rely on or lean on each other.
I posted this in my former suburb’s COVID Freakout group after someone posted as article that was horrified that some rich Chicago suburb allowed their kids to go to school 1 day a week.
“FWIW, I’m thankful my son is back in school five days a week. Remote learning is big on remote and low on learning. We are going to have an entire generation of kids that lost of year of learning and we will continue to promote them through as if they learned what they were supposed to and pretend it doesn’t matter.”
You can imagine the warm reception is received from a group dedicated to freaking out over COVID, but my wife did call me to let me that it made the day of one of our friends trapped behind enemy lines.
Prior to going back five days a week last week, my son was on a hybrid model where on home days they would watch the live lectures given to the other half of the class on his computer. He admitted to not knowing when key quizzes were scheduled because he would fall asleep at his desk watching the lectures.
Some educator ought to experiment by putting lectures up on a website with a player that lets the students choose the playback speed – anywhere from half speed up to as fast as they can understand the lecture. While keeping track of which speeds the students choose. Then, cross-index their grade for each test with how fast they ran the videos.
If they all do better with faster content, then teach the course faster. I keep seeing comments like “a lot of the students fall asleep,” and that’s either an indication of a deadly-boring teacher, or a good teacher who’s taking it too easy.
We’re still remote and my best guess is we’ll go hybrid in January for semester 2. More & more of my students have their cameras off. Students I taught last year are participating less. When I email them to ask how they’re doing the general answer involves having a hard time finding the energy to get up, stay interested, or even care about school. These are seniors.
My sophomores appear to be handling things better. I have 16 students in that section vs 22 in my senior class. I’m still having trouble balancing lecture, reading, and discussion.
Fortunately my school is considering cutting 5 minutes from each of the periods to give more break time. The students need to get up and walk away from their work areas. Of course, how do we know they’ll do that?
My own middle school child is suffering from lockdown enhanced anxiety. Her brain right now keeps her from doing her classwork (I really do not think she’s shirking). Her school is being so very helpful. We just need her to get through this year. I don’t care if she has to repeat Algebra.
I’m so frustrated. I have colleagues who have co-morbidities & I know my school will let them teach from home. Keeping our youngsters locked down is just cruel. I’ve offered to supervise classes for those teachers so students can come back. I doubt the county health cowards will let us do that.
So you think you’ll be remote? I’m so so curious about what my school will do for the second semester. We have a whole separate schedule for remote courses- from 10am to 3pm, 60min classes with 15 min breaks and a generous lunch period. It’s really tough to find ways to get the students to get up and stretch, go get fresh air and also keep them generally motivated. Even at school when they have free time, a lot of them just stay on their phone in a corner.
In my experience, the seniors fared better at the start than the underclassmen. The ones I taught had better study habits from years of training and while they too had a hard time concentrating for a long time, I didn’t hear them fiddling with Snapchat constantly. They also opted to keep cameras on. The freshmen (this year’s sophomores) fared much worse- cameras off, distracted sounds, cellphones on all the time, lack of organization, etc.
The situation is so hard on everyone. It’s a very kind offer you made to step in to help your colleagues at home so their students can come back. Keep me updated, will you?
I can’t imagine that a COVID freak-out group would receive this very warmly but we all know there is another side to what these decisions look like. I’m sure there are schools that are handling this period better and others worse. For me personally it helps enormously to hear what is going on for other teachers, even in my own building. Sometimes you can feel like you’re the only one having a hard time and it helps so much to realize that the issues are shared.
Maybe someone’s tried it? Something to consider is that teachers often have mixed-level groups. I have students who are very quick to understand material and others who are very slow. It’s particularly hard to figure out how not to lose the slow kids in a remote class, especially if they are not very good at asking questions and they’ve turned off their camera.
If they did, they’re keeping the results awful quiet.
I will keep you updated.
We’re running 75-minute blocks; 4 blocks/day. It’s grueling on the students as they have 3 or 4 blocks/day (each student has 7 classes). We’re considering 70 minute blocks to give them more time to be off the computer. I’m moving very slowly through the curriculum but trying to engage the students & have them think. Just trying to do the best work I can under the circumstances.
I’m in LA County & they’ve just posted waiver information for TK-2 at low income schools. They’ll let 30 schools return/week. There are over 1000 elementary schools in this county. I don’t see how they let private high schools return before December. Semester 1 ends in December.
In a non-covid year, we start at 8am and have 80 minute classes in 4 blocks per day, 15 minute passing periods with a 60 minute lunch period. Remote changed all that to the schedule I mentioned before because the screen time was intense for everyone. This year we start at 9am and the period from 7:45-9 is supposed to be office hours to meet with remote students, but I think those students are so tired they agree to meet only if the teachers make appointments. The teachers appreciate the office hours, but from what I gather, the lost instructional time is particularly hard on the AP teachers.
We have the same December Sem1 end. You’re in CA so it is more likely you will get a remote second semester but here in Illinois, I have no idea what will happen. I’m bracing myself either way. It’ll get worse no matter what because the flu will look exactly like covid so there will be even more kids popping in and out of class constantly.