Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This situation has many facets. As such, it's more complicated than it seems initially at face value. I don't think I really understood it until we began speaking with some of our kids' teachers recently about their real world challenges. It's hard on them and the schools to navigate what 'open' actually means now logistically. We went from no physical limitations with ~ 25-30 kids per classroom sitting just inches away at times. Was it too crowded before? Possibly. Then to 6' and now down to 3'. Meanwhile, buildings and their classrooms haven't changed sizes to accommodate these new social distancing rules and all the same number of kids returning. Simethings gotta give like half the desks per class or a totally different configuration still = fewer seats. Then, there are those who are still remote which must be juggled with in-person students. Could they have done more to plan for the partial return to 'semi-normal' or 'in-person' learning? Possibly. But it's still not an easy thing.
The biggest difficulty for teachers is that the techniques and best practices that you would use in an in-person classroom are not compatible with online or distance learning.
In other words, teachers are taught from day 1 not to teach from the front of the class, but to circulate and engage students, do lots of hands-on activities, engage students in small group discussions, mix things up, shoot out questions, and so forth.
But none of this stuff really works with online learning, especially when kids mostly have their cameras turned off, which most districts allow them to do because of bandwidth issues (not everyone has robust enough internet for video zoom) and because of privacy issues. Some kids might be living in poverty and don't want to show the insides of their homes and such.
But right now we have most teachers in Clark County teaching classes that are simultaneously in-person and remote. In schools that have returned to hybrid or mostly full time learning there is still a cohort of students who have chosen to remain with remote learning. And that puts teachers in a real conundrum. During 1st period Algebra do they sit in front of their desk the whole period so they can engage with the remote students from the zoom camera? And leave the kids in the classroom to their own devices? Or do they circulate and engage the students in their classroom helping them individually as necessary and leave the remote kids to their own devices. You can't really simultaneously teach remote and in person at once and do it well.
That leaves teachers with a hard choice. Do they create two separate classrooms and use a self-directed online curriculum with their remote students and a different in-person curriculum with their in-person students? That means 2x the amount of lesson prep, grading, etc. and running what is essentially 12 separate classes instead of 6. Or do they just run all their classes, in-person and remote as if they are all remote students and just have the kids in their class sitting on their computers doing online work all class period?
The real solution is to split up all the classes so that online teaching specialists can run all the online classes and regular classroom teachers can run the in-person classes. But with the continually evolving nature of this pandemic that really isn't possible. Because the cohorts and classes are continually changing.
No matter what, this year has been about 2x more difficult for classroom teachers than any other school year. The task they face is nearly impossible. And a lot of kids are falling through the cracks. Because of all the remote school options, truancy is basically impossible to enforce and a lot of kids are just disappearing out of the system.
In addition to all of that, these teachers were never given any real training in remote learning nor time to adequately prepare. A pandemic is kinda funny that way. Our daughter's math teacher who she also had last year and really liked shared some of his struggles. It's not like he doesn't care about his students and want them to excel through providing a better online experience. He admittedly just wasn't given either the time nor resources to create something excellent. Whereas, with his in-person classes, he had achieved that through years of honing is craft. Along with that, he has 5 kids with two under three who are constantly screaming for his attention at home while he tries to instruct from there as well. It's like they were setup to fail from the very beginning or at the very least thrown a few quick resources on remote education and told to 'Go!'
Since we had homeschooled for many years and our kids took remote courses from providers who specialize in that type of environment, we know they had way more resources, training and a real focus on developing excellent online learning experiences after years of practice, trial and error, parent/student feedback, etc... That is something learned and honed that never comes overnight. And none of them were balancing live online with in-person teaching at least that we were aware of. Rather, online was their real specialty and focus.
Derek
Last edited by MtnSurfer; 04-02-2021 at 01:11 AM..
In addition to all of that, these teachers were never given any real training in remote learning nor time to adequately prepare. A pandemic is kinda funny that way. Our daughter's math teacher who she also had last year and really liked shared some of his struggles. It's not like he doesn't care about his students and want them to excel through providing a better online experience. He admittedly just wasn't given either the time nor resources to create something excellent. Whereas, with his in-person classes, he had achieved that through years of honing is craft. Along with that, he has 5 kids with two under three who are constantly screaming for his attention at home while he tries to instruct from there as well. It's like they were setup to fail from the very beginning or at the very least thrown a few quick resources on remote education and told to 'Go!'
Since we had homeschooled for many years and our kids took remote courses from providers who specialize in that type of environment, we know they had way more resources, training and a real focus on developing excellent online learning experiences after years of practice, trial and error, parent/student feedback, etc... That is something learned and honed that never comes overnight. And none of them were balancing live online with in-person teaching at least that we were aware of. Rather, online was their real specialty and focus.
Derek
This.
Creating a top rate online course in any subject actually requires thousands if not tens of thousands of hours of labor. The companies who do it spend years fine-tuning their products as well as testing them and editing them. And we expect teachers who often lack the tech savvy to do it on the fly with only a couple of hours of prep time per week? It is basically the same thing as expecting say a biology teacher to create a modern biology textbook on the fly with a couple of hours per week of effort. You might get something, but it isn't going to be pretty.
Actual state of the art online curriculum is expensive and usually charged on a per-student basis through subscription services. So for example, here in Clark County we have perhaps 2 dozen high schools and probably over 100 math teachers who are teaching the same HS geometry class. Instead of taking a state of the art online geometry curriculum off the shelf by one of the big venders (which would cost an enormous amount of money) every single one of those math teachers is left to their own devices to try to put together an ad-hoc online geometry class in their spare time while teaching full time. And now do it in hybrid mode with both in-person and online students in each class. And that's just one class. Teachers often teach multiple subjects and at the HS level, students generally have 6 subjects per day.
They should just put in a phone call to the rednecks in the states of Georgia and Florida.
Somehow they figured the complexities and have had students 5 days a week in person since August 2020.
The rednecks in Georgia and Florida have 2 to 3 times the Covid death rate as Washington, despite the pandemic actually having started here. We could have done things like Georgia and seen another 10,000 or so Washingtonians die. People here made a different decision.
And yes, even though schools aren't a hotbed of Covid deaths, it is all inter-connected. No part of society acts in isolation. Kids who are asymptomatic carriers take it home with them and spread it into the community. Teachers and other adults who work around schools are also vulnerable. Over a thousand teachers and school employees have died of Covid to date from across the country.
Did Clark County schools get it exactly right? Probably not. But the lack of guidance and investment from the Federal government has been deafening since the pandemic began. And local school boards are not equipped to make sophisticated pandemic-management decisions on their own, not to mention they lack the resources to implement many of the pandemic best practices in terms of ventilation, distancing, sanitation, and so forth. Retrofitting modern air filtration and circulation systems into 50 year old school buildings is not a simple, quick, or cheap task.
The rednecks in Georgia and Florida have 2 to 3 times the Covid death rate as Washington, despite the pandemic actually having started here. We could have done things like Georgia and seen another 10,000 or so Washingtonians die. People here made a different decision.
And yes, even though schools aren't a hotbed of Covid deaths, it is all inter-connected. No part of society acts in isolation. Kids who are asymptomatic carriers take it home with them and spread it into the community. Teachers and other adults who work around schools are also vulnerable. Over a thousand teachers and school employees have died of Covid to date from across the country.
Did Clark County schools get it exactly right? Probably not. But the lack of guidance and investment from the Federal government has been deafening since the pandemic began. And local school boards are not equipped to make sophisticated pandemic-management decisions on their own, not to mention they lack the resources to implement many of the pandemic best practices in terms of ventilation, distancing, sanitation, and so forth. Retrofitting modern air filtration and circulation systems into 50 year old school buildings is not a simple, quick, or cheap task.
Yet again, not surprisingly, you are completely devoid of the ability to use rational thought.
Washington (and Oregon) enacted near identical policies for everything as California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey.
California's death rate per 100,000 is slightly better than Florida. NY/NJ/MI are all worse than Florida.
In light of this, you cannot say that WA would have had 10,000+ more Washingtonians die if schools were open, because in some places where schools have also been just as shuttered, the death rate is higher.
As far as lack of federal guidance, have you not been following the CDC for the past 14 months? It's been a disaster of confusing and constantly changing information. Fauci hasn't been any better.
Despite nothing good from the federal government, which would probably wouldn't help anyway because respiratory illnesses hit different parts of the county at different times and in different ways due to climate and solar exposure (Vitamin D), no one thought to reach out to the schools where it is working and asking them how they got it working. That's not just ignorance. That's incompetence and negligence. The end result has been state and union sponsored mental abuse of hundreds of thousands of children in Washington state.
Somehow the rednecks opened their 50 year old school buildings yet the enlightened dipsticks of WA still can't figure it out.
Regarding the 1,000+ teachers and school employees who died of COVID (or with COVID, maybe not "from" COVID), how many contracted it from a school setting?
Clark County data shows that 1% of known cases came from a school setting, whereas 5% were from a warehouse. Maybe we should shutter warehouses and stop producing food and goods. That'd be great to see the locals when the shelves stay empty for weeks and food supplies expire.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
