Some school districts plan to end the year early, call remote learning too tough
wsj.com
wsj.com
1. Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course while the other teachers provide TA-esque support to the students in their "section." If a student is struggling with homework or to understand the lecture, they can go into a video breakout room and get 1:1 support without interrupting others.
2. Education has been focused on in-person lectures with home "work" for decades. Given the current situation, it seems to make the most sense to provide offline/prerecorded lectures and to use the class time to support the students with direct help for their work. Students can listen to a lecture without a live teacher, they cannot ask questions about their work without one.
Are their holes in both of these? Sure. Are they as bad as just moving the existing paradigm online? I don't think so.
Many of my teachers, most even, could have been replaced, with with some gain, by high-quality videos and quizzes.
The point is between a simulacrum of a dog, and an actual living breathing dog with its own wants/needs/spontaneous behavior and personality.
Similarly, the expectations of an actual teacher, vs just self learning with tests.
This issue is captured in Blooms 2 sigma problem.
Someone get's hives around dogs. Perhaps the online version is better.
Depends on the need.
I want to learn about all dogs. Online would offer more. I want to learn more about this one dog perhaps locally observing is better.
Depends on the technology at the time.
Online might offer the same experiences locally in the future. VR might give you the chance to meet that dog and interact virtually.
It's not just class too. I forget what I talked about in meetings with colleagues. I talked to people from class and my coworkers about this, and I'm far from alone with these feelings and a lack of focus on zoom. Something to do with the cadence of speech, lack of body language maybe, maybe something deeper and more primal. I thought I would love working from home, now I'm itching to get back just so I can function again.
That's a really weird way of thinking about it. You're completely ignoring the relational aspect of learning and focusing exclusively on the artifact of a particular presentation of some content. You also seems to be assuming that everyone learns the same way without variation. Commodification and mass production are improvements in a lot of areas, but not all.
I don't think you can rank the teachers of the world from best to worst, when often the best teacher is a good-enough one that understands you.
People with CAPD are often dependent to a high degree on lip reading and video feed may disrupt the connection between words and mouth movements just enough to inject too much noise into the signal. If you don't realize this is what you are doing, you can't readily compensate when it gets disrupted.
But I'm not sure it replaces anything that exists (I'm not sure you argued this!). A core reason we have teachers and not a TV screen is because they can organically read the room and adjust the lesson plan in real time. That feedback loop is constantly ongoing even if you never noticed it.
I don't want to jump too far through the experiment but I think the conclusion is the same: any good idea is really just, "we need to do more." So if the argument is that we can do more with the same resources, I fear it's because we fail to grok what those resources are actually doing today.
Furthermore, unless we suddenly hire a lot more teachers each student's group is going to essentially be their normal class and we are back to the whole class being kept back when someone needs extra help. Again, the only difference seems to be the main lecture is performed by someone besides the students' teacher. This could be better if the new teacher really is "world class", but I doubt it will be an extreme improvement.
But a pre-recorded lecture is usually much shorter than a live lecture. The one-way communication of a one hour class can usually be condensed into a 10-20 min video recording. This is by using a script that optimizes the time to communicate the information in the best possible way.
The rest of the time should be spent learning by doing or talking to others.
And that's not even to mention, any of the students that know they aren't following along, but don't really care and would rather zone out/sit on their phone the whole lecture than get 1:1 help. Do you really expect most students will seek help for themselves?
Perhaps you could modify your plan and say that students who got lower than a B+ or something on a recent quiz are required to attend the breakout group to get help from the teacher, it's not up to them to self-select. But then you're back to... the status quo, that "breakout group" is just the regular classroom. You have one class for the advanced students to go through material quicker, and another class for everyone else. That's already the way many schools are structured.
If your kids are struggling, it must be because you are immoral, lazy, have bad "culture," etc. Internet discussions of parenting always devolve into success theater.
But the kids themselves will eventually speak up. If you follow HN for a while, you will also read stories from a surprisingly large number of successful people who had deeply negative experiences in school as kids. I got through high school by pretty much ignoring all of the "content" and doing well enough on exams to get OK grades, plus I had fairly high test scores, and didn't aim too high with my college applications.
Most of the time spent is just trying to keep the kids on task not actually spent trying to teach.
There are sure to be holes, like does this lead to treating the in person teacher as a commodity and reducing the value of that in person time?
But definitely this is a time for disruption in this space.
I have reservations about fully remote programs, because in my newly remote grad program right now I am worthless with zoom only lectures, and I'm not alone.
To further compound the issue, in many places students don't have reliable internet access or a decent computer.
Living in the 3rd largest school district in America, I'm wondering if secretly ,the administrators are seeing this as an opportunity to get 1 step closer to automating away the teacher so that they can stay within budget constraints and serve more people.
Feels like it is all going the wrong way. We need to flip this narrative: massive federal funding for schools, more teachers, better pay for teachers, better facilities, more field trips, small student to teacher ratios, free tutoring.
Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school, so (I think) school needs to accept the power of these bonds and facilitate social interaction between kids. De-prioritize the output, and prioritize the process of learning things together.
It is unfortunate, and a poor reflection on modern culture that 4th grade is too young to form strong bonds outside of school. Kids are missing the after school unstructured free/play time. Decades later, I'm sill best friends with kids I went to school with in 4th grade.
Everyone will catch this. To think otherwise is folly. Our intrepid leaders have had between 4-6 weeks to sort things out. Hope they did.
My kids can go play outside. This is getting absurd.
And shelter in place with strong social distancing has proven to be the most effective way to slow the spread of the virus given the current testing capacity and lack of contact tracing.
This is bullshit.
We will learn more during this time about how the virus works and how to treat it as well. Hopefully that knowledge will help us exit faster but we should expect this to be a long term new normal.
Travel and tourism is definitely going to take a bigger and continued hit. But there might be ways to make it work.
I have my hopes, if not at least until Winter.
Luckily, I have hobbies that are easily done without large groups of people and believe I can avoid groups of 10 or more people for most of summer and probably 50 people until September. (I've not spent more than a few minutes with more than 3 others for the last month and half)
If you live in an area that's a hotspot then you need to have tighter restrictions than if not. If you know you're in an at-risk group then you need to have tighter restrictions.
Our restrictions and daily routines are naturally going to have to shift about as the virus ebbs and flows. Which is why a good local testing and contact tracing regime is essential to end the most draconian lockdowns. If you don't even know how the virus is distributed locally and can't quickly act to quarantine people who have been in contact with someone who is infected then it's very hard to say mingling together is a great idea. That said the risks of kids playing together in a neighborhood seem pretty minor if otherwise people are keeping to themselves. The likely negative consequence is that if one family has a member that tests positive then all the others in the neighborhood will need to quarantine until they can be tested or enough time passes. Here that's 14 days if you're not symptomatic or 7 days after the symptoms go if you are. Then the less likely consequence is that you're the vector that passes on the infection and it kills one of your neighbors.
We're relaxing our restrictions here a bit in Iceland on Monday and I'm really interested to see how that goes.
Like most people on the site, I am well adapted to the conditions forced upon us by this pandemic.
What I can’t do is go travelling, what with the airports being closed to tourists, the hotels being closed, and the airlines cancelling any flights other than repatriations, etc. — and I can’t go to local museums, because they’re closed.
I can’t go to a pub to hang out with local furries, because the pub is closed. I probably can’t go to the large furry convention that was going to happen later this year in my city, because the hotel it would be held in is currently being used as a pop-up hospital. Even if I got around the airport problems by learning to fly (I have the money and time for lessons but not for a plane), I couldn’t go to any other cons instead because their hotels have also been converted into pop-up hospitals.
I can go for walks, but I can’t go to any parks, because they’re closed.
I’m also not comfortable with selling my old home in the UK and buying a new one in Berlin — but that’s not because of risk to me, it’s because of the situation in the UK. It’s not really a “hobby”, but it is something I had planned to do and have put off because of this.
I’m not into music or dancing or spectator sports, but those are big parts of most people’s lives — now impossible because their venues are closed.
The only thing I can do is walking (on sidewalks), passive a/v entertainment, MOOCs/etc, and video games.
Suits me, but if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.
It's all a game of numbers - sure, there will be some transmissions if you let children play together in open spaces, but overall, from what current data suggests, it's not a significant vector. We generally have to think like this now, there's no such thing as absolute safety and we really have to think hard about what should be restricted and what negative effects this will have long term. Isolating kids at home for months is IMO not worth it.
On a different note, neither is allowing small businesses to fail in droves even if they can provide a good hygiene concept. Switzerland has also opened up hairdressers since this week - with masks, hand sanitizing and contact tracing being mandatory for everyone. We'll see in a couple of weeks whether this works or not.
Adults more or less try to maintain distances, as you said.
Another commenter pointed out that there were only a few school-aged kids in their neighborhood. I noticed when I graduated high school there weren't many younger school-aged kids in my neighborhood even though I grew up with a good number of people nearby. When my sister moved into a newly built neighborhood when they had kids other young families moved in, too. I think neighborhoods tend to cluster with families, it cycles and may not always catch on every generation and some kids get stuck.
Those situations sound incredibly depressing, but I don't think it necessarily reflects all of society.
In my area, kids on the B team in FIFTH GRADE play over 55 basketball games a season.
That's more than any college.
It's the same lunacy for hockey, baseball, etc.
They get social interaction from the team, sure. But it's no longer a seasonal thing. It's year round and cancels out a lot of play time in the hood.
Maybe that's because as a child I had unsupervised access to a networked playstation and a computer. I would have loved to stay at home all day.
As an adult I hate it. When my city opened back up I took up cycling as my only mode of transport because I've taken the feeling of physical exertion for granted.
It’s no different than removing sports as a separate subject. You don’t learn math or English running down a track field and you don’t learn how to swimming reading 20000 Leagues Under the Sea.
My son is the kid who relishes every chance to miss school, but was devastated to find out there would be no more school for the year.
This isn't just an issue for those of limited financial means. There are areas where internet access is not available for any price or the cost for internet access to support regular viewing of video classroom content would run into the hundreds of dollars per month.
The main problem with this approach is that teachers are generally not used to working cooperatively. They have their "way" and they don't like to deviate from that "way". As odd as it sounds teachers also don't like being observed in the classroom. Teaching is incredibly difficult (by far the most difficult job I've ever attempted to do). The constraints you usually have to work with also mean that failure in at least some forms is inevitable (or to put it another way -- failure is the norm and you take your successes where you can get them). Because of this teachers are often incredibly defensive about how they approach tasks and decisions that they make. As much as I hate it, it is completely usual in my experience that teachers obfuscate what's going on in the classroom. Having other teachers present is really challenging for most teachers that I've encountered.
I honestly believe that team teaching is the way to go, but there are a lot of hurdles that you need to deal with before you can get there. The technology is not really the stumbling block. It's much more the social dynamic and the need for realistic and sensitive teacher evaluation methods. With some students you can literally just lock them in a room and they will learn the material. With other students, it doesn't matter how good the teacher is, they will just refuse to learn (for a huge variety of reasons -- medical, physical, psychological, etc... things that no teacher is realistically able to cope with). Quite a few teachers have realised that they can game the system by simply filtering the students by how easy they are to teach. And because teaching is a very stable job with a reasonable income, you are always going to get a fair number of people who are more interested in gaming the system than teaching stuff. And as is usual in large organisations, people who are good at gaming the system and have no interest in the technical side of the job tend to rise to the top of the decision making ranks. It's quite a difficult problem to solve.
Teaching requires a feedback loop. What does the child need to know? What do they know already? Are they engaged? Can they explore the problem space themselves and get feedback and direction?
There is some merit to pursuing these ideas at the paradigm level for various kinds of post-secondary level education, and of course it is already happening- though still poorly.
Before that level- basically before the age of 25- about 1% of what we call "education" consists of "teaching"- having a source of truth utter statements around the intellectual architecture of various "subjects" that we have constructed and partitioned over the long years of human civilization, with varying levels of inspiration and motivation.
That "paradigm" that ideas like these hope to transform- that really is at most only 1% of what education is for the under-25s.
What's the 99%? Mimic-ing, copying, replaying, performing, processing, engaging. School is an elaborate community improv performance, staffed at best with performers whose skills are measured in EQ, not IQ. I regularly witness school staff plan the model of their interactions with the kids down to the minute, down to the second- tho just the model. The actual performance is spontaneous. It is theater. Yes, there is a curriculum, and homework, and grades, and so forth. Those are all part of the act.
There are no "best" teachers. There are only an uncountable myriad of 1-1 relationships and engagements, each of which represents a full spectrum human interaction possibility (only a fraction of the potential of which of course is ever fulfilled). And though I love "work" and do a lot of it and have my kids do a lot of it- that also is just performative. The goal isn't to complete the assignments in an intellectual progression. No. It is in service of developing behavioral- awareness of self- and emotional- empathetic, sympathetic, awareness of others- tools to engage in the world.
Not to put too high a gloss on it, but in digital terms an orchestrated ChatRoulette is a closer approximation to what actually happens in an education context than the Yale lectures and homework helper.
And there is simply no substitute for the all too real, full spectrum chemistry that develops when people are in physical space together.
So changing the digital teaching paradigm is essentially meaningless. And "remote learning" is about the worst oxymoron.
The best thing we can do at a policy level is provide financial liquidity so that parents can afford to devote their full attention to their children, while we are in this phase where that is required.
We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books. You can go read Kolmogorov's probability books, you can read the Feynman lectures on physics. You can even listen to the Great Courses and learn whatever the bleep you want there. And do you? Do even adults have, as a group, the discipline, attention, and stamina to self-teach like this? No.
I call it self-teaching for a reason. When I taught, I looked into students' eyes and on their papers. I walked around the room. I had them present on the board. I prodded them to discuss ideas and argue with each other. I made mistakes writing proofs or calculations on the board and made students catch them, even -- yes, this is a skill math profs practice, because it's inevitable and recovering from the fall with grace is a learned skill! Every class in person was an interactive intellectual wrestling match. Video is just not the same. Interrupting others with your questions and discussion is vital to learning.
I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.
But more than that, the part I actually liked about teaching was that person-to-person engagement. The arguments, the exploring, the discovery. Seeing people (students) rise to challenges and do things they didn't think they could do. I've done a lot of online teaching, and certainly some of that can happen, but especially with struggling students -- they just don't log on. They slip away. At least if someone's sitting in your classroom you can provoke them or cajole them or charm them into a reaction that you can tease into engagement.
Having experienced this myself many times over, I now know exactly what to look for in a book when I am self learning. I don't know how this skill is to be taught but if remote learning was to succeed, different methods of learning needs to be outlined and taught to the students and get them to learn to select one appropriate for their learning styles and subject.
Also (another opinion) you get intuition doing practice problems and playing with the idea(s), it’s almost impossible to get intuition just by reading.
Interesting. I'm currently taking a Course through Rutger's University Online, and so far I and most in my class are also weeks ahead of schedule, and are just awaiting grading on our final projects. As for my grade on it: mine was based on an actual project I did while I was at BMW so I documented the entire process. I used it to get promoted and sent back to VW as I thought I was a better fit there so its well detailed and I got sent back in a month after, so it worked.
> I call it self-teaching for a reason.
I'm a big proponent of home schooling and online learning. I'm an autodidactic person, so I just took notes of what would be on the exam and tried my best to incorporate it when I studied at hoome and tried to find usecases to relearn it later and how I would actually understand it for future use. Its how I learned calculus, my last math class, after failing algebra because I tried doing everything the instructor's way in class--I had to go everyday to get the first failure dropped from my GPA.
To be honest, this is why I never did well in school for things that mattered on paper: I often got Bs and Cs most years and I was always told I was being an underachiever with much higher potential. The truth is I just realized that Schooling and Education are two very different things and the former did very little provided I landed a job in my career.
The classes I often got As in I just didn't care and repeated whatever the instructor said back to them or told them what they wanted to hear. Rote learning is a poor way to instruct, but it scales so they do it.
To this day I can still recall all of my essential amino acids, their molecular structures, most functional groups reactivity and about 50 reaction mechanisms and can explain them in depth because I found utility in them for my career within the laboratory: I graduated 11 years ago. Whereas when I went to office hours back then most of my peers found it hard to do that from semester to semester. I was a Cell/Molecular Biologist (that's where most of the jobs were) but excelled at Biochemistry and Microbiology because that's where my interests were but you probably couldn't tell from most of my grades. When I went into the Industry is when I really shined.
I think Online learning appeals most to people who have had an independent educational development environment, and thrive within it. I never took honors classes in school or university but in HS I was recommended for a few so was made to sit in them for a week and left as it looked like a hassle (the instructors heavily grade on class participation) only to find out later that they did that to weed the herd and the teacher often gave lots of time for independent learning to my dismay.
> I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.
I think the only two professors, or teachers for that matter, that I ever liked and enjoyed speaking with iwere grinding away to be able to say the same one day.
They did it because it was pre-requisite for funding their lab/research and tenure, none of them seemed to like it very much but they were awesome at it despite that because they approached the material from an Industry perspective and often went against conventional wisdom. I still my remember Chemistry professor eating his lunch and going over certain reactions on the dry board and then going to the teacher's protest afterward to try and get back pay for teaching back-back summer courses during the budget/strike days in the CSU/UC system... I wrote on my class evaluation that 'this University does not deserve him.'
And I meant it, too, he went to Oxford for his BSc and Edinburgh for his PhD and post doc, I just thought what a waste... but he later told me in private over some drinks its because his wife taught there with tenure and his kids didn't want to leave CA so he turned down offers before the financial crises so afterward he was stuck. I hope he is well.
The best teachers are those that can induce pro-learning behavior in others, and books are a good medium to learn from once induced but quite poor in inducing the necessary behavior by itself. Videos are usually better than books, but tend to fall behind compared to the best in-person teachers.
That said, no school is actually teaching people how to trigger pro-learning behavior in themselves. It is always assumed that either students learn it as a side product from all the other classes, or it is the responsibility of the teacher. That in my view what is missing from the picture when we a transitioning away from in-person education system into a online system.
I think a clear value proposition is something that’s really lacking for students at all levels. I remember a lot of vague “you’ll need this later” sentiment from my time in school, which is just not motivating.
That and counteracting the “I’m just not good at math (or whatever subject)” mentality would go a long way to addressing this self-learning issue
The learning principles in the summary you linked are also major themes we covered in the course, but I think the emphasis is a bit different because the 38-801 audience is primarily future educators (who are of course also lifelong learners)
0: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/index.html 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3557656/
• Hide the tutorial for the problem, in the "shape" of the problem, so the student won't even realize they're being taught something. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE)
• Make the student/player feel a need for a new tool, before the tool is introduced. Have them try (and perhaps fail) to solve the problem without the tool first. (See the "keys and doors" discussion in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouO1R6vFDBo&list=PLc38fcMFcV...)
• For each new concept, present its lesson as a series of spaced-chunk challenges, where each chunk ramps the difficulty up to a climax and then down again to a gentle denouement. Give the learner's mind a chance to feel a sense of mastery over already-understood concepts, not just the continual stress of new challenges. (See https://boingboing.net/2015/09/14/super-mario-maker-levels.h... or http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2011/12/a-pleasant-journey-through...)
• Gate problems behind proof of mastery of previous micro-skills, not just in the form of obvious tests, but also in the form of multi-step problems for new knowledge which can't even be approached without also having another prerequisite skill. Ensure that it becomes impossible to "leave behind" a foundational skill—i.e. ensure that the learner will get stuck without the new tool, and so realize they need to backtrack to pick up that tool, rather than flailing uselessly at the next problem.
• Meter and visualize progress. Map acquisition of micro-skills directly to some sort of measurement the student can look at (a level number; a tech tree; a skill grid), to feel that they're making progress. Ensure the system is designed such that this number goes up not just when they make progress on new skills, but also when they go back to shore up their knowledge of old skills.
Etc.
The main upside is that when people can finally take a breather at the end of this, I'm sure that at _that_ point more people can realistically regroup and be creative moving forward.
As for holes - Without thinking too deeply, the main issues I see with breakout sessions and student support in an online environment are:
1. Not being able to see how students are working and struggling requires that students themselves be proactive in seeking help. However, not all schools push students to behave this way nor are all students capable of realizing when they are stuck or going too far down the wrong path.
2. Lower income students are automatically ruled out and/or have a far less optimal experience. The longer remote learning runs with this type of divide, the larger the education gap becomes.
I agree. A huge chance is being missed. However, this opportunity has been missed for a long time already. The pandemic is just making this painfully obvious now.
While theoretically this sounds good, it doesn't work in practice. Kids, espcially young ones (I have a 2nd grader), need that personal interaction with their teacher. Schools are already overwhelmed with the teacher to student ratio. Imporsonalizing this interaction will only worsen an already bad situation.
Local teachers would provide the personal interaction during work periods where kids come online and get help.
Grade 2 and younger are already learning through tv. Big Bird is rarely in person but kids know and learn from him. Is Barney still around? The Wiggles? Those top performs seem to hold attention as well as the local puppet show.
Ask a preacher to solve a problem and they’ll use prayer.
Ask a politician to solve a problem and they’ll draft a law.
Ask a developer to solve a problem and they’ll write you an app.
That said, all of this still requires a fully engaged adult in the room to monitor interactions and help things stay on track and answer questions. My wife plans a full curriculum for all our kids together each day with breakout sessions for grade-appropriate subjects. This has been basically interrupted by the current official video curriculum of our school system - and our system is doing better than most on this subject. I have the luxury of an adult available to teach most of the day. Many do not. But I still want to yank my kids out of official "school" and get homeschooling certified until this ends. It burns you out. I'd welcome the schools closing officially now, and offering optional assignments to pass the time for parents that want to use them but that's not really equitable, it just works best for me.
A video conference is great but it can't help keep a virtual classroom engaged and flow with the kids' questions as well as an in-person room. There just isn't enough bandwidth.
Experience: currently three gradeschool and younger in my house.
My 5th grader got reprimanded today for spending 30min on fonts & colors on an essay that itself only took 30min... as a simple example. Another example: I regularly have to prevent both kids from accessing Youtube during school time.
I'm sure teacher's union would be loath to try new things like this or "rank" teachers in any way..
I mean, software developers love stack ranking, right? We can go ahead and fire anyone who doesn't close X Jira tickets per month, I'm sure. Lines of code? Business impact? (oh, sorry, that critical bugfix you did doesn't fit in our measurement framework so you're underperforming, have a PIP).
"Wait but we can just measure performance with tests" LOL OK, if you thought "teaching to the test" was bad before...
And anyway they do already measure performance with year-over-year student progress on state tests, and there are consequences if you suck at it for too long. At least around here. There's enough leeway that it's not horrible but it's also not great and does encourage some of those teach-to-the-test behaviors that people claim to hate. A good teacher would 100% for sure teach better not being judged under that system, and it's one of many things that push them out of teaching—even if they do fine on the metrics, it contributes to frustration and job dissatisfaction, having to do less-than-optimal things or else stress about test scores[1]. A bad one, perhaps, is better for being so judged.
[1] Example: several of these kids are effectively two grade levels behind on [subject]. Do I try to fill in those gaps, and leave them with little understanding of the material that will be on this year's test and so nearly certain to miss every question, or do I treat of the earlier material only when absolutely necessary so they see most of this year's stuff (even if understanding it poorly), so score a little higher than they would otherwise? The former is definitely better for the students, but if you get a "low" class you're (the teacher) gonna be fucked on your standardized testing scores if you do that. This is a real, and not uncommon, situation to be in.
My experience thus far, having 3rd and 5th graders at home, is that remote math learning is a piece of cake and the quarantine experience has really illuminated for me how slowly public schools move. It has also clearly demonstrated that teacher language arts & writing requires 1) skills I don't have, and 2) direct interaction with a competent instructor.
Note, too, that not all teachers have adequate internet access at home to effectively teach remotely. My 5th grader's teacher is quite rural and has 5mbps down, 1mbps up internet service. She can barely participate in online meetings and cannot effectively upload any video content.
#2: 100% agree, but some classes lend themselves this more readily than others.
If all it took was the best lecturers, we could have been doing perfect distance learning since 1982 via UPS and VHS.
And it is not like passive watching videos would be something new in education either.
The flipped classroom concept itself is nothing new. My issue is with the “remote” part of that. There is value in kids working on an art project together or working in small groups to create a poster presentation, etc. The lecture-homework paradigm might be appropriate for high school, to for younger grades, there really aren’t lectures as much as interactive discussions and hands-on exploration.
This is very different from colleges - that generally actually focus on teaching stuff (which means students do all the important work themselves).
All the important roles of primary school are hard to accommodate via remote setup.
I personally think MOOC-with-tech-advancements is the future of education. And I have a suspicion brick-and-mortar educational system has played a role in crippling its progress.
Some other things I've seen and experienced that have seemed to work well and that I'd like to see more of:
- course staff who serve primarily as advisors and guides to provide and help students find, discover and use resources for self-directed learning and to help when students encounter difficulties
- schools that helped students buy cheap paperback books for recreational reading
- scaled out peer tutoring, where the school pays students who have taken a course to tutor students who are currently taking the course
- self-paced learning without harsh penalties for "falling behind" other students or an arbitrary course schedule
It's crazy that so many commenters here seem to think that everyone is well equipped to be a teacher with zero training or experience. It's hard.
It's even more crazy that no one seems to realize that most parents are acting as teachers, while trying to maintain full time jobs.
This isn't just "teachers not adapting", or "we need VR". This is fundamental to the fact that most households need two working parents just to survive.
Only because we created a world where every household had two working parents.
Regardless, that's the situation -- so can't be ignored.
On the one hand inflation-adjusted GDP is 5x higher than the 60's (https://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted) so even if the workforce doubled the pie got much larger.
On the other hand markets like real estate have somewhat inelastic supply and higher household incomes as a result of dual earners might just bid up prices.
I think a good amount of the problem then became, these new normal double income households then decided they also wanted children. So we slowly convinced ourselves that both parents can work while raising children, which doesn't really work. Your child ends up being raised by day care.
It's a good example of having your cake and eating it too.
AFAIK, studies and history demonstrated opposite to be true, if there is an opportunity not to work and lead comfortable life, most people choose not to work.
But for most people, leaving their professional career is hardly reversible in the long term, and means becoming economically dependent on their partner. Which only works if the couple stays together (and the partner keeps their job).
I hope I can stay together with my partner for life but even if so, I wouldn't be too comfortable if she left her career and became economically dependent: what if I die early, for example? A career is a hedge against adversity.
Even staying together, if a big economic crisis comes, with two jobs it's easier that at least one of us will keep their income than with one.
Additionally, we don't do common core in our household, so my wife and I have no issues teaching my son math (we settled on Saxon math). I neither have the time nor energy to learn common core math in order to support my son.
Sadly, a lot of the elementary school teachers I've encountered also lack that number sense, and some even detest(ed) math. And yet we're asking them to teach it to our kids. I'm not for charter schools usually, but I'd really love to start a charter elementary school where each subject is taught by someone trained in that subject and then with, say, a MAT in elementary ed, as opposed to just a bachelors in elementary ed. I wonder how much better kids would do in math and reading especially, when they have teachers who appreciate math and who like to study literature and read for its own sake.
For some people, this is simply too abstract. You can teach children the breakout method or normal method, their understanding doesn't change. They're just memorizing one procedure over another. The ability to analyze how to operations work doesn't improve with common core, it's just more steps.
I've seen this first hand. I taught long division to a younger family member that was struggling with whatever nonsense method common core cooked up (something about boxes and dots and circling stuff). They had literally never seen long division, I taught them to divide the same numbers they had on the page in front of them in less than 10 minutes, and they could arrive at the correct answer consistently. I asked the kid to explain the procedure of what they were doing for the common core, they had no idea and lacked the ability to articulate the process whatsoever.
Yeah, this is happening to my oldest child - they're on multiplication and division and when I showed them short and long division, they had no idea what I was doing. Common core mathematics is far more memorization and repetition. You don't derive how to actually solve the problem. It's shocking to me that this is the sole method we're teaching kids.
EDIT: And I actually like the Common Core methodology. But it's very mathematically incomplete.
Back in the 90s, when I was in school, I don't recall this kind of rigor in math at all until I got to Calc 2 and needed to actually focus on memorizing patterns & rules for solving integrals. Everything, at that time, was rote memorization.
>> solve problems
These are incompatible, which is what I am saying and the parent above my comment is also saying.
>> simple multiplication tables (and similar)
If you fail to memorize these, you can derive the answer using your fallback to addition, which you've been shown how to do. In Common Core textbooks and in the class my oldest is in, these are assumed facts. Breaking down how to derive multiplication and division is at least a failure of the teacher in the class, if not the methodology, though I suspect the teacher is pretty good.
Common Core relies on a lot of memorization and pattern matching. This is fine, and good for everyday use. It is not learning it from first principles, which makes it hard when your pattern matching engine isn't working properly.
Both methods should be taught in an integrated fashion. I support Common Core - and have for a long time - as an adjunct. Not as the primary method of teaching math. Most kids will find Common Core easier, I'll readily admit that. It also has better carryover to everyday use, as I've already admitted. But it lacks rigor.
>> Back in the 90s, when I was in school, I don't recall this kind of rigor in math at all until I got to Calc 2
We're likely the same age. My arithmetic classes were far more rigorous than most of my mathematics classes beyond that up until Linear Algebra.
This is where the disconnect is. It may have very well been designed with that goal in mind, but common core is is memorization in another form. The form of memorization is worse than the traditional form because it involves more steps, and the steps are very unintuitive.
I don't think kids will be able to explain why it works. They might be able to recite definitions and phrases that they were forced to memorize, but they won't be able to put it into their own words. I know, because I've seen it first hand from a kid I consider to be bright. We can blame parents, we can blame teachers, but it doesn't matter. Common core is not optimized or appropriate for childhood education in the US.
Then maybe the problem is with the teachers/parents and not the Common Core? Of course the kids won't understand it if their teachers don't understand it. Just like kids won't enjoy/understand reading if their teachers don't read and talk about reading, etc.
Adults utterly confused about (600+30+4)(100+20+7) do prove that they did not understood what is going on. The follow the algorithm, but don't know how to do expressions. And they have been taught the old method.
Also, this (600+30+4)(100+20+7) not be too abstract for average intelligence adult.
That's just a more explicit explanation of multiplication in pre-common core math. It's just a different explanation for the same thing.
I guess these are third grade teachers, so maybe it's not a big deal, but WTF?
It's just about breaking apart problems into digestible pieces.
I'd love to start a charter elementary school (as much as I generally dislike the concept of a school getting state/federal funding with no testing accountability) where each subject is taught by someone who actually studied the subject, not just "elementary education". Then you might see kids enjoy math and understand it, as their teachers understand and enjoy it and can teach that; it's infectious. I wouldn't be surprised if reading scores also raised when kids are taught by people who clearly enjoy reading and are passionate about reading.
I think we could stand to move the math curriculum up 3-4 years. Geometry and trigonometry can be taken in 5th grade instead of 9th, algrebra 1-2 in 6-7th grade, then calc in 8th grade, instead of waiting until high school to take these courses. Then in high school, you could offer advanced courses and an actual course progression in statistics, rather than solely AP stats.
Tone down the difficulty, maybe, but there is no reason why these concepts shouldn't be introduced a lot sooner. Basic algebra is pretty intuitive, and in geometry classes you are kinda just plugging and chugging sines and cosines with your calculator anyway. This is coming from someone who sucks at math and wishes they didn't.
I did automatically 90+12 and I am old. How would common core improve my mathing?
I've seen parents try to work from home remotely, while also taking care of and schooling their kids, and it seems like a nightmare.
Our lives/schedules were built around 20 hours of childcare/school per week, and without it, it's been a nightmare. Productivity is at an all-time low. Not really sure what to do about it.
We tweaked my wife's setup and it works pretty well now, though she is dreading if they choose to do live online learning in the fall, as that will be something completely new to tackle. Currently she uses Google Classroom, Desmos, and Kahn Academy for the teaching side. She plans and distributes lessons in Google, uses Desmos for some interactive activities where Desmos scripting allows her to check work and give feedback, and Kahn Academy as some supplemental teaching to her notes. In addition she has certain hours everyday for certain classes and uses an iPad + Google Meet to show notes to her students and work problems they may have an issue with. So far that's been working.
Live teaching would be a little more difficult with this setup but it could work.
I find cutting to an infinite whiteboard and/or video picture-in-picture to be the easiest way to convey whiteboard ideas. Teachers seem to get really adept at writing with a mouse, but I would heavily suggest investing in a Wacom--even a used 10+ year old Wacom would be sufficient.
What might be easier (if you have a compatible Mac) is to use Sidecar [1]. A desktop app will probably have more options for drawing and more options for integrating with video chat software.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210380
I'm not familiar with the landscape of software out there. There's a whole bunch, but I don't know what's good. Maybe a web-based whiteboard could be done on her iPad while she streams video and shared from a desktop?
For reference, Khan Academy uses [2] SmoothDraw [3] (Windows Only) and a Wacom Bamboo.
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130429170548/http://khanacadem...
Schools (and pretty much everything else) were caught completely off-guard by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Setting-up an online education infrastructure takes a lot of work and requires significant mental retooling. Teachers need to adapt as much or more than their students to the new paradigm. Zoom, Hangouts, Teams, or Jitsi are not replacement for in-person instruction.
Part of this is that in remote learning the curriculum materials and assessments need to lend themselves to greater self-guidance than those of brick-and-mortar books and other resources. This is not impossible, but also not easy to do on short notice. I am not surprised that schools are finding it simply too hard to put together packets, distribute them, and trying supplement with video conferencing when the materials are based on a different assumption.
I am optimistic that this will further the reach of remote learning, but I am doubtful that the stagnant style of traditional education will shift to fully embrace it. I foresee a lot more alternative educational institutions emerging as the traditional schools very slowly adapt.
They miss their classmates. They miss their teacher. They miss most of all the routine, getting to go to school, and all the fun things they got to do during the day. My 5th grader is very sad to be missing out on a graduation-like experience with a lot of end-of-year events that would typically happen for outgoing 5th graders before they leave for the middle school.
This isn't an "opportunity for a new normal". This isn't a situation which can or will last "indefinitely". It is assuredly unhealthy for kids this age (to say nothing of the rest of us) to be isolated from their friends and communicating only over Zoom calls.
My kids are hurting in a suburb with a big back yard, mountains of toys, a stay at home mom, and two dogs to play with. I can only imagine it must hurt the least privileged children hardest of all to have lost access to their school.
I don't expect there's much of any learning going on in general below the high school level. Particularly for households which don't have parents who are willing to dedicate several hours a day to basically run the lessons. I think people who can honestly claim that their under-13-year-old is distance learning without a parent assuming a basically full-time role of teacher, are few and far between.
I wonder how curriculum will adapt to incoming students in the fall. X graders who don't know approximately half of the X-1 grade material. Particularly for younger students where classes are less likely to be grouped by ability, anyone who did actually successfully learn anything from March-July is just going to have to sit through it being taught all over again to the majority of students who didn't.
I was talking to my 5th grader's teach last weekend about the next year. She doesn't know, either, but is assuming they're just going to bake in an extra-long review period going into the year. Alternatively, at least in CA, they're contemplating starting the next school year in July rather than August, to provide more time for catch-up. To your point, though, what about the kids who were able to keep pace throughout -- are they going to be forced to repeat half a semester to maintain equity in the classroom? That would be terribly unfair.
We're lucky in that we've homeschooled before (she went back to public school for the company of other kids), and we've worked out ways to encourage and help focus her natural curiosity already. I just gave her a Debian 10 system and said "holler if you get stuck"; so far she hasn't.
When I got to university it was different, I cared and tried and got involved with everything. It was a totally different experience. It made me regret the way i was in high school a bit and kinda made me wish I'd been more involved. It wasn't as pointless and ridiculous as I thought and there was no reason for me not to other than my unwillingness to.
If I'd actually experienced these things, I might have gotten more out of high school and not been so hostile towards it all for so long, when in the end education only benefitted me and there's a kind of education you can only get by taking part in things with people around you.
I know it's not the same, but I know there's lots of kids out there who didn't wait as long as me and know now, well before I did, what they get out of having other people around. As great as distance education can be, even if you've got your classmates there on video or something, it's still not the same as a group of students getting together and working on homework or studying, the ones that do I mean, and even for the ones that just get together, there's a lot of bonding and forming as people that happens that just can't really be replicated outside truly free interaction with other people. Even if you're all working on school work. It needs to be some kind of natural free setting. Something's missing otherwise. Again, it took me a long time to really get this.
This whole path is why I'm deeply suspicious of educational and career models which make excessive claims to be 'meritocratic.' Measuring humans is hard, and mostly we just measure the wrong things and pull the wrong motivational levers.
University I think is better because you do mostly feel like you 'own' your own educational path, and there's more room for individual learning choices.
The problem is that my elementary school children (who are ADHD and on the autism spectrum) have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning, so I have to break the day up into lesson time and fun time and regulate that because they're too young to regulate themselves yet. At school they have teachers and peers to interact with, which keeps them interested.
So while working full time from home, I have to also support them in their learning and keep them on task. I also have to help them login to various things, set up zoom meetings, help them out with their work when they get stuck, and get the computers set up for them to do their work. Juggling logins and zoom meeting links gets complicated and time consuming.
If that were my only job, it would be manageable, but trying to work on my work and manage them has proven to be quite a challenge. If they were at a point in their lives where they could manage this all themselves, that would be great, but they're not there yet.
So I think that some students can benefit greatly from online learning, but others struggle.
For my kids, at home online learning is not as good as being with their peers, but it's been a lot better than nothing at all.
I'm looking forward to summer when I don't have to balance both work and managing their school work, but I do plan to keep giving them things to read and math worksheets. Those are the things they can do well on their own.
Is this how your local school is handling it? I can't even make it through full day meetings as an adult and pretty much zone out after 20 minutes of any online meetings I'm in now.
You also need to understand that if a kid has 2hr worth of work online, the odds are good they'll sit in front of the computer all day unless someone is supervising them. This is the real issue, especially for younger children.
Many students will fail to thrive in such a scenario.
These students need different kinds of instruction. This is one thing that leads to home schooling - the government school does not provide the needed instruction methods, and the parents can either pay for private or do home schooling (or move).
Source: many family members were teachers.
I don't know of the source, but when I was in HS in the late 90s each teacher got a computer due to some initiative. None of the teachers knew what to do with it and at the time tech got obsolete quickly. A computer purchased in 1995 was dog-slow compared to what was sold in 1999. We had a "computer lab" built, but no classes or teachers qualified to teach so it was empty most of the time. You can say technology in the classroom is a chicken-and-egg problem, but that assumes technology is some savior and resources weren't better spent on traditional school resources.
Still others have connected hotspots with lunch pickups.
I'm in the San Jose Unified School District here in the Bay Area, and it's hugely diverse. Because of that diversity, the district has been reluctant to mandate any specific online ed requirements, so as not to appear discriminatory toward the families who don't have the ability to participate in online learning. In return, that actively harms the families who can. Currently, all the assignments are "suggested", are ungraded, and the teachers are only "suggested" to schedule 2 online class meetings per week. what this means is that kids in families who are willing & able to maintain learning pace are being told both that 1) here is the list of weekly assignments 2) your teacher is only going to be marginally available, and 3) none of this work is going to be graded.
This is the on time in my parenting experience where it's been 100% clear that private schools have a night & day advantage over public schools and districts.
Yet on a few weeks notice we somehow imagined it would work to move every student over? Even if you increased the budget to match Distance Education it takes years to train the teachers/staff and train the students.
And we believe this because we fetishize 'remote' anything and just want it to work?
This also being the worst of remote, it's remote from home.
It's no wonder the world can't move forward.
That may seem to be an odd choice, as I’m an excellent manager, but I don’t like being a manager, and I love engineering. I’m pretty good at that, as well.
There’s really no curriculum for this kind of thing. Schools and training are all about introducing people to a subject “from scratch,” which involves a lot of “substrate.”
I did sign up for an introductory course on one tech that I’m working on, and to which I have had little exposure; but, for the most part, it’s all been self-teaching.
I really don’t know of a way to make that work with primary education. In my case, it’s a very personal journey, fueled by motivation. I don’t think that can be synthesized.
Of course, everything also needs to be measured, which brings in a whole infrastructure for accreditation and metrics.
Its very easy for the student to be browsing, chatting or gaming with the class going on.
The best way to learn will always be a focussed, distraction free, peer supported classroom.
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/04/28/...
TLDR - In the early 2000s a high school student did a project mapping the “social network” of her school. Her father just so happened to be a scientist. He used her school project to create a model that showed by closing the schools during a pandemic in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, only 500 people got sick. Leaving the schools open would result in half of the population infected. Closing schools is one of the most effective strategies we have to prevent a contagion from spreading.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distan...
Districts and states need to be asking themselves: "What if that isn't possible?"
There's a lot we don't know about the virus. How long does immunity last? How long will it take to get a vaccine? What happens if multiple flare-ups occur as people rush back to work, parties, cruises, and the rest?
There's a growing sense that there's light at the end of the tunnel. That light was achieved by strict measures that are melting away at a blistering pace. Nobody knows what happens when you start loosening up.
One possibility is unavoidable: there are more active cases today by at least an order of magnitude than there were when the restrictions were put into place. Exponential growth hasn't been suspended just because people need to return to normal.
Officials interviewed in this story didn't indicate what will be happening after instruction ends for the year. It might be a good time to assess what worked and what didn't, then develop a plan and do teacher training for distance learning for Fall 2020.
Where is their shame and self-respect?
So mostly, shame is absent and their self-respect is fine, thanks.
I was a homeschooling parent and, for me and my family, it was wonderfully less burdensome than public school.
A snippet from a recent comment of mine which may be pertinent, though, based on the headline and long experience with remote learning (I also have taken college classes online):
Most people overestimate how much work they need to put into homeschooling. They think they need to teach their kids like eight hours a day because that's how long they are in school usually and they feel overwhelmed.
This is not true.
One article I read years ago indicated that after standing in line, changing classes, doing lunch, having roll call, etc was accounted for, students in public school spent between one and three hours a day on actual learning.
Similarly, under California law (back in the day), one legal option for homeschooling was to hire a tutor for three hours a day. Not eight. Just three.
If you care about your child's success, teach them how to do math. If they don't know how to read, teach them how to read as well. Probably 2-4 hours of instruction per day, at the absolute max end of the spectrum. Kids from the age of 8+ should be able to accomplish tasks with much less instruction time, and the bulk of the time will be individual effort. Of course, it's mundane and isolating, so don't expect them to sit for hours on end doing school work either.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...
For those who think schools should remain closed, please explain what we should do next school year when the pandemic is still ongoing? We obviously can't leave schools closed indefinitely and there's no guarantee of an effective vaccine anytime soon.
But with everyone WFH, making time to work with and teach your kids is difficult. At least young students..
Im sure this is solvable, yes, but it would take a lot of planning, lots of training, money and lots of IT.
I am glad they got something in place and are trying to do the best they can with what they had. But wow, parents are frustrated.
And lets not forget the equity issues inherent in redesigning classroom content for a class that now consists of kids with no internet, no laptop, old PCs with old browsers, kids being expected to look after young siblings, etc
This isn't just 'tweak a few things so they work better on a laptop', it's really a fundamental shift that needs time and careful planning to address.
fwiw, until our district settled on a specific set of policies, one of my kids' teachers had already -- the first week of WFH -- setup Google Classroom, used Classdojo to communicate with parents, shared a weekly agenda with links for augmentation material, and setup Zoom meetings 3 days/wk to teach & help the class. she's had to scale back some of this because it's against policy. My other kid's teacher was absent the first two week and, since the district's policy has clarified, is following it to the letter. Thankfully, a stay-at-home dad in the class has created a class email alias, is organizing multiple online sessions per week with parent led code.org, drawing, art history, music history, daily math check-ins, and informal "recesses" (social hours).
You may or may not be surprised how few parents are qualified to supervised their kids' learning.
I would put dollars on the table that such is already happening for every parent that is willing and able to do it, because they were already doing it before too.
If you cannot talk about the solutions, then you're probably better not talk about the problem either.
I had been reasonably happy in public elementary school until now, but am seriously considering private schools for next year because I'm convinced this reacclimation process will be much, much smoother with fewer regressions.