A Great Lakes analogy of schooling in the Time of Covid floats well today.  We are carrying on with teaching and learning from the lifeboats after all passengers on the SS Public Education were forced to disembark due to a pandemic on the water.  Now that we have been in the lifeboats for several weeks, it is time to reacquaint ourselves with lifeboat living and monitor and adjust to our new realities.

The lifeboat analogy is apropos because no one volunteers to transfer from the comfort of a safe and thriving big water boat with hundreds, if not thousands, of passengers to bob about for an undetermined time with minimal support systems.  In our socially isolated and sanitized boats, we are called to row toward the port of Re-Opening.

The first adjustment is to our foundational understanding of remote education.  Begin with this: Remote education is not regular schooling and whatever we do to try to make it seem and act like regular schooling remote education is not regular education.  This is why

• Remote education suspends the reality of teaching and learning in a school environment.  When we shut the schoolhouse doors, we closed off school as we knew it and began something entirely new – remote education.  Hence, we cannot think about remote education in the same way we think about regular schooling.  The doors are closed – period.  Most teachers cannot access their school and classrooms due to the schoolhouse being closed and sanitized.  Teachers are teaching with what they carried to the lifeboat and can virtually access.  Remember this statement – the reality of regular teaching and learning has been suspended.

• Remote education is school-provided mandatory home schooling.  Who would have thought that public schools would be encouraging and engaging in home schooling, but we are.  This recognition is essential to understanding our new circumstances.  Remote education is home schooling.

The “mandatory” part of this new home schooling is the killer, because most parents did not and would not choose to be home school parents.  Home schooling has always been a choice, but not today.  The entire emotional and logistical construct for successful home schooling is absent in mandatory remote education.  Without debate, that emotional and logistical construct is essential for successful home schooling.  Many parents do not view their role in remote education as voluntary partners in teaching their children.  They are kidnapped adults forced to do something they are not prepared to do – teach school.

• Teachers have never been so valued as they are now that schools are shuttered.  On every regular school day, teachers are the surrogates that all parents rely on to supervise, care for and educate their children.  Without prejudice, parents make large assumptions in handing their children to teachers for more than seven hours each day and for almost 200 days of the year.  School attendance is a mainstay in the lives of families with children.   And, schooling is teachers teaching.  School activities, arts and athletics add another layer of schooling that we take for granted in regular times, but we grieve for when they also are shuttered. 

• Remote education for socially-isolated children in homes where parents are still working or trying to work further stretches the suspension of school reality.  Literally, remote education says “Kids of all ages, you are on your own more than ever before.”  For many, there is not an adult at home during their remote school day and older children are in charge of younger children.  This new reality hits the concept of responsibility for learning with a “thud”.  Children as daycare for themselves and younger siblings are being called upon to be home school supervisors for other children while they also are students trying to learn.  Ugh!  Even in schools using the gradual release of learning responsibility model that eases a student toward independent learning, a teacher still is in the physical background ready to assist.  In remote education, teachers are present only on FaceTime, Zoom or in the mail.  In many homes, kids are physically on their own. 

The second adjustment for lifeboat teaching is that teachers need to get comfortable sitting at the oars of the lifeboat.  Can you picture Ben Hur?  No one else but a first grade teacher is going to teach the children in the first grade teacher’s class.  At a time when we were making headway in the movement from teachers as independent contractors in closed-door classrooms, remote education reverses that progress.  Every remote education teacher teaching from their own home now is an independent contractor again with oversight, communication and collaboration conducted in the virtual realm.  Kudos to principals who are checking in with teachers on a frequent basis.  However, a scheduled FaceTime visit is nothing like a classroom walk-thru or a casual chat in the hallway.  And, collaborative communication with other teachers is no longer as easy as sauntering into the classroom next door.  Remote education is conducted by remote educators.

The third adjustment is that remote education does not work for everyone.  Some lifeboats will sink.  After more than a month of attempting remote education, some school districts are throwing in the towel.  They are declaring “ENOUGH!  The school year is ended today!”  Why?  Because the suspension of school reality, the assumption that school-provided homeschooling can be mandated for all children, that parents will volunteer as home school parent/teachers, and that we can do all this without prior preparation is just too much to bear.

Other schools, our local district for one, are “remoting” daily toward the usual end of a school year in June. Teachers are truly demonstrating their expert understanding of instructional design by broadcasting daily lessons to their students.  These lessons look and act much like a lesson a child would experience in the teacher’s classroom.  I marvel at the care these teachers take in writing directions in simple and sequential language that leads a child through a morning of schoolwork at home.  We need to celebrate that there is a lot of good remote teaching for a lot of children.

Remote education in the lifeboats is not easy.  It is not easy for teachers, students or parents.  We were not supposed to be here.  That said, “Row on!”.