It was so bad in my school district. I think it was worse than no school for a year because of the chaos of teachers doing different things and no good monitoring or follow-up.
Classes ranged from some teachers sending out a single email a week with assignments and tests and grades to teachers taking attendance the minute class started and then disconnecting. For 10 year olds.
This means I would get silence for a long time, no posts in the classroom site or Teams and then an email saying “major test is tomorrow, make sure your kids study X,Y,Z” with X being chapters in a pdf, Y being a broken link, and Z being some slapdash PowerPoint posted minutes before the email. And there’s multiple subjects.
It was such a surreal experience with countless “we’re doing our best” emails from school leadership.
It was even more performative and useless than normal school.
I know my mileage may vary and it may be problems with my school district. But in the same district they didn’t suffer like this and my kids performed better.
And this is with me spending 1h+ every day helping, running around between telework. I can’t help but think how it fared for kids who didn’t have parents who could flex their work schedule to support digital school.
My wife is a teacher in Chicago Public Schools and there are classes in her school that have spent less than half of the school year in the classroom because of quarantine every time a kid gets COVID. Because the kids all eat lunch together, unmasked, and indoors, well they're all considered close contacts. So back to remote lessons they go again and again.
How exactly is this better than a consistent schedule from home?
Classes ranged from some teachers sending out a single email a week with assignments and tests and grades to teachers taking attendance the minute class started and then disconnecting. For 10 year olds.
This means I would get silence for a long time, no posts in the classroom site or Teams and then an email saying “major test is tomorrow, make sure your kids study X,Y,Z” with X being chapters in a pdf, Y being a broken link, and Z being some slapdash PowerPoint posted minutes before the email. And there’s multiple subjects.
It was such a surreal experience with countless “we’re doing our best” emails from school leadership.
It was even more performative and useless than normal school.
I know my mileage may vary and it may be problems with my school district. But in the same district they didn’t suffer like this and my kids performed better.
And this is with me spending 1h+ every day helping, running around between telework. I can’t help but think how it fared for kids who didn’t have parents who could flex their work schedule to support digital school.