the "lazy teacher" attitude is taking root

I really feel for all of you teachers! I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult this situation is for you.

Thank you for your dedication to your students.

Do we share the same kid?  Mine does this AND I’m teaching middle school at the same time!  I’m exhausted at the end of the “day”

We’ve had 3 zoom meetings at a time going in this house before.  Chromebook (mine from school) for my 3rd trader, IPad (belongs to the kid) for the 4 year old, macbook (mine from school) for me.  

thankfully we have plenty of devices here and xfinity had been good for us with bandwidth.

My dh is a teacher and he is doing more work now than when he was in the classroom. He is sometimes still on the computer until well after dinner doing lesson plans, answering emails, etc. He still did lesson plans and all before, but he has a very active classroom teaching Spanish with competitions, games and other physical class participation. He now has to switch to total lecture type teaching and has to plan differently. He also has office hours every day where he has to be at his computer between certain hours in case any student needs extra help. It is most definitely NOT an extra 6 weeks of vacation. Half the parents don't even make sure their kids are in class every day. THEY are the ones treating it like vacation. Their kid doesn't show up to class, so they come crying to him the day before the test and he has to teach the whole thing over again. He doesn't even mind though, I get more miffed about it than he does haha! He definitely does prefer teaching in a classroom though.

Internet down again. I finished responding to emails at 10:30 last night. It was fine. 4:30 am? Down and still down. If it does not come back up in six minutes, the two teachers and one assistant will have difficulty teaching today! We were out for three hours one afternoon last week. And if we’re out so are some of my students. Ugghh. So not a fan. I’m not allowed in the school so can’t go there to access internet.

We have had so much trouble with getting the text and writing tools to work easily in Seesaw and it is frustrating the crap out of my kid. She would rather use her iPad when she can instead of her Chromebook, but moving and resizing the text boxes is troublesome and the drawing tools make the writing nearly illegible on a good day. Especially for math where there might be 8-10 problems on a page and all the answers have to be tiny, she’s banging her head into the wall by question #3 and just wants to print it out and do it with a pencil. I’m just glad we have a computer and printer so we can do that, but dang it’s frustrating.

Or she will do half a page of work and then try to open up some music or something outside of Seesaw and when she goes back everything she’s already done didn’t save and has vanished. You would think after having that happen once she wouldn’t do it again, but noooooo. She’s done it like three times now and OMG the wailing that ensues! And I’m sitting there saying to myself, “how many times do you have to do the same dumb thing before you learn *not to do that* until you’re DONE with a task and have submitted it?” 

Good times, good times.

Can he do this? My ds teachers are recording their class sessions and emails it to the students. Whoever doesn’t attend needs to watch. And everybody needs to take and submit notes. This is 9th grade.

I disagree as well. If anything, this it’s showing me how essential it is for me to be with my students. As amazing as my parents are— and I do not judge anyone for how they are “teaching“ their kids during this crisis – they just don’t understand how to teach their kids. They send me videos of them reading with their kids, and they never let their kids struggle. They jump right in and fix every problem without giving their kids a chance to fix it themselves. I get pages of writing with every single word spelled correctly. From kindergartners. Also – parents don’t know how to ask their kids questions. I watch videos of them doing a math activity and it kills me that I’m not there to push and question them to deepen their understanding. Most of all, I miss the collaboration. Playing math games, doing STEM projects together, watching partners read together, solving problems together… Collaboration is an essential skill in today’s world. And you cannot get that on a computer.

Most of my parents are just that —amazing parents. But I am a teacher. I am proud to be a teacher, and I realize now more than ever that I’ve got some skillz. 

Teachers are Thinking outside the box. Our gym teacher started having the kids do sit-ups and push-ups but then he started having them do a paper, 10 facts about a different sport each week. And that has been Logan’s favorite assignment! It’s always the first thing he works on, even though it has the furthest due date. I have to remind him to save that one for later.

Where I live, this is a legitimate complaint. There is no online teaching. Or handouts or anything. The elementary kids have been completely abandoned and the teachers haven’t done a thing for 8 weeks now. My sister is a teacher and I have one son in grade 5. They are scheduled to return to school on May 19. I’m hoping they work through summer break. The teachers here have been on paid vacation.

Or, as it is with two veteran teachers in my district, don't have internet at home?

Middle school teacher here.

First, let me say that daily, I am thankful that I do not have small children (or even teenagers) at home during this time. I'm watching my colleagues with kids in elementary school and I don't know how they are doing it. Hats off to all parents who are working from home and wrangling their kids' education as well. You are saints.

Second, I am sorry for the situations where the work going home feels impossible to parents. I think a lot of schools made the mistake of sending home what the teachers would normally teach. My department decided to stop what we were doing in class and design a quarantine curriculum. In other words, we send work that kids can do independently or with very little help from their parents. We've mixed review of skills with new work, and so far, we've been able to hold to our intent; parents are thankful for it.

Third, I don't know that I'm doing more work, but it is certainly different work. I don't feel emotionally exhausted at the end of the day (seeing 171 7th graders a day will do that to a person). Seeing kids on Zoom makes me realize how much I miss them. They send me the sweetest emails about how much they miss our classes and being all together.

Finally, when I hear about parents who want their kids to have more work or spend more time in virtual classes or the government pushes to open schools too early and without enough of a plan, I am acutely reminded that many people see schools as babysitting and...I don't even know how to respond to that anymore. We can't even get enough subs on a good day. If we go back too soon, I'm not sure what is going to happen once the teachers start to get sick. 

And here's a PSA-When you hear of Bill Gates working with Andrew Cuomo to "reimagine education" in New York, be very concerned. Bill is a homegrown boy and I know that his money and influence do all kinds of good in the world, but he needs to butt out of education. He started the "school-within-a-school-" movement and it failed, so he pulled funding. Countless districts were left with infrastructures they could not afford without the funding from Gates. He was the funds and philosophy behind common core. He has since admitted it was a failure and provides no more funding. The rest of us are stuck with standards that are poorly written and in many cases, developmentally inappropriate. What is next? "Individualized Learning" which sounds great, but left unchecked, can become 100 kids in a room, on computers, monitored by a "coach" (read underpaid para-educator).

Okay! Off to my first Zoom meeting of the day!

Classroom does not play well with Khan academy and Discovery Science.

And what happens then when the majority of a grade level is retained for the following year? How does that work in terms of staffing, class sizes, curriculum and testing materials, room assignments, etc? What if most of the kids who didn’t do the work were academically ready for the next grade before we left school in March? Should they be required to repeat the grade anyway?

Nothing is ever as simple as we should just do this or that.