When a team goes into the locker room at half time, it is not just to rest. With another two quarters to play, someone will ask, “What have we learned from our first half of play?”. Our school is nearing the semester break, the mid-point of our academic year. We played the first semester in pandemic mode and face the second semester in a similar mode. What have we learned in the past 90 days that will help us in the next 90?
Without being too simplistic, too critical, and without pointing fingers, consider this lesson already learned. And, what we should teach our children from what we learned.
Even though 300,000 US lives have been lost, hospital beds are full, bodies lie in makeshift morgues, and hotspots of infection roam the nation, our national life plows forward. Our indicator of this truth is that UPS or FedEx will deliver whatever you order to your door. The business of America is business and America delivers. Exchange the “man in brown” for a grocery clerk, gas station attendant, meat packer, farmer, home builder, car assembly line worker, or local EMT – life goes on. Add, school teacher. The world does not stop for a pandemic.
In short, public education continues during a pandemic.
What did we expect? Anything else was naïve. Ironically, our world came closest to shutting down last March when the infection rate across the nation was almost nil. School campuses closed. Retail stores went to curbside pick-up only. Grocery shelves were bare of cleaning supplies and toilet paper. Only essential workers were physically at their job sites. Across the summer and through the fall, our culture pushed hard for life to be open while the number of fatalities skyrocketed. Go figure.
Our most unique dichotomy of opened and closed is that bars are open for defiant patrons but school campuses are closed for needy children. Or, this is not a contradiction. We are protecting that which we value most, children as our future.
What do we teach children about this?
Education is essential for life and for our future. Children have been educated during every national crisis in our history. During wars, depressions, past epidemics, while our ancestors were on the move across the continent, and all time in between, our nation has been committed to educating its children. This pandemic only causes us to explore new strategies for educating.
If the first semester was full of changes, expect no less during the second semester. 2020-21 will be a full year of schooling.
School campuses may close to in-person learning, but schooling does not closedown. Teachers are teaching from their homes, off-campus tech centers, and from their classrooms. Children are learning at-home, in neighborhood pods, at new schools open for daily attendance, and sometime in-person. Schooling has become a pattern of hybrid strategies, but it continues providing children with needed education.
Expect the second semester to extend the hybrids. In fact, anticipate using features of remote education for the remainder of your life as a student.
Now, more than ever, it is apparent that it takes a community to educate children. With school campuses closed, parents and grandparents are staying home to be with their youngest children not just for daycare, but to support daily schooling. Older children tutor younger siblings. Community donors are providing school supplies to children in need. School buses deliver meals, not just lunches, to children at-home. However, all at-home support systems are experiencing pandemic fatigue. We currently are experiencing support system failure due to exhaustion, not a lack of desire to help.
As more parents and grandparents return to employment due to need or because they no longer can be at-home tutors, schools will need to create new options for at-home learners. Stay tuned for new game plans during the second half of play.
You can make your kitchen table into your classroom desk, art table for drawing and painting and making art projects, music studio for reading and writing music and tapping out a beat, and a table-top studio for social networking with classmates, teachers, friends and family. Schooling is not a place; it is wherever you are.
Expect even more table-top experiences in the third and fourth quarters of the school year. Geographic maps will spread out, timelines will be drawn, science experiments will foam and smell, and writing and math work will cover the area.
Learning is being engaged. For at-home learners, the first step in engagement is pressing the “on” button. Once powered-up and connected, engagement is a greeting from your teacher and classmates. The second step of remote engagement is talking and listening. Your teacher wants to hear your voice asking questions, responding to questions, making observations, explaining what you think and how you feel, and being you. Engagement is participation as a student and that is the same as always.
Expect more frequent personal checking on your learning by each of your teachers, your counselor, and your principal. Our locker room examination of first half experiences tells us that too many children are drifting. Drifting is due to your passivity as an engaged learner and our failure to personally talk with each student every day. Talking is not just “hello” and “good by”, but our asking and you making explanations related to daily learning and personal well-being. Expect daily talk to become more personal.
Everyone is learning new skill sets. Teachers and students alike are becoming adept at using cameras, screens, digital platforms, and sharing techniques to engage in daily schooling. Children, as so-called digital natives, may be most adept at learning new skills.
Expect your skill sets to shift for learning new skills to using new skills in more sophisticated ways. Expect more group work in which you are networked in problem-based assignments. Expect questions and assignments that push your past “yes and no” responses to “tell me more”. Expect to use your skills in new ways.
School lessons are the same for children in-school and at-home. Your teachers expect you to learn your annual grade level or subject area curriculum regardless of your location. As you participate as at-home learners, flop between in-school and at-home due to quarantining, and finally become more permanent as an in-school learner, you will be receiving a continuous instruction in your 2020-21 curriculum.
Expect assessment to be an increasing part of your second semester. Your teachers and principals want to know the quantity and quality of what you learned in the first half of the school year. They need to know what to re-play so that your first half learning was solidly learned. They need to clarify their game plan for the second semester. Expect a lot of school testing.
The pandemic is not going away; we are improving our capacity to live with it until it can be prevented from spreading as an epidemic. We may have COVID at a lesser degree for years to come. Vaccination and mitigation are essential to our new capacity. With parent permission, you will be vaccinated. As a student in-school, you will be mitigated.
Expect that your school will use mitigation – masking, social distancing, small groupings, and limited public access to school during the second semester. That word, mitigation, that few of us understood prior to COVID will be part of our future school for years to come.
Stay tuned for Lesson #2.