Is anyone in your household doing distance learning?

I have been distance teaching. The class I teach is very small and they get most of their material from the professor, so I’m really more supplemental. As far as distance teaching goes, it’s about as easy as it could be, but I still don’t prefer it. What’s been nice are the one-on-one sessions.

I taught in the spring, but quit after abruptly switching online and having all of the covid issues after spring break. Teaching was difficult enough, but to add the children being home and needing help with remote learning was too much.

My kids are currently remote learning and it is a giant pain. The learning management system is difficult to navigate and some teachers do not communicate enough to the parents who are the ones ensuring that younger children complete their work. The youngest (1st grade) has to have an adult sit next to him almost all day long. I’m sure the kids are far less physically active than usual, even though they run around the kitchen island between zoom sessions.

I am not picking up anything interesting. I don’t get common core math and the science and reading/writing are too basic for me to have learned anything. The only good thing is that we don’t have to get up as early in the morning to get the kids to school.

I will tell you my colleagues with young children are all exhausted. This is unsustainable. There is no way to fulfill all of the demands of full-time work and household duties with young children doing remote learning. And I am in academia, with expectations of publishing and grant applications. I can’t keep up at all.

My daughter is doing two days in school, two days remote (we call it remote in our district) and one day of asynchronous. The asynchronous just started in November. When they made the announcement, I had to google what asynchronous meant. I knew what it meant, the dictionary definition, but I didn’t know what it meant in regards to school. The dictionary definition didn’t describe it in regards to school, either.

She is in middle school. I have asked her several times what she prefers, the days in school or the days home doing remote. She likes the days home doing remote. I asked her what about seeing her friends. She replies that she sees her friends anyway, which is true.

I just got an email this afternoon from the school counselor that my daughter is struggling in math, and she wants to talk to me on the phone next week. I am not sure how she thinks I can rectify it. They have her in school 7 hours a day. I am not good at math at all so I’m limited with the help I can give her.

I don’t know how much she’s learning in all subjects. All the moms say their kids are not learning much.

I really feel for the parents of little kids, or kids with ADHD or other things like that. Friends with little kids who have ADHD or autism report that their kids don’t sit in front of the computer too well for too long.

@jca2 When she does remote does the teacher lecture online just like in class? Or, the kids do self study?

@JLeslie: Remote is like being in class except it’s on camera. The Asynchronous Wednesday is the kids log on in the morning (to show they’re “present” for attendance) and then they get assignments from Google Classroom and they work at their own pace. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of work on Asynchronous Wednesdays. It’s supposed to be reauthorized every month. It just started in November. I’m sure they’re going to do it again for December, since case loads are getting worse. On Wednesdays, the custodians are cleaning the school.

I actually feel kind of bad for the custodians. They didn’t sign up to sanitize things. They signed up to mop the floors and wipe the desks and stuff like that, and now they’re sanitizing things and everything relies on their diligence doing their jobs.

My sister was a fifth grade teacher (10–11 year olds) in the US until she retired last year. She now tudors four 9–10 year olds 3x a week that are struggling. She also is in contact with several other teachers at the same school on a regular basis. According to her, younger students are challenged by distance learning. Personally, I wonder if it was designed too quickly and/or the instructors weren’t trained.

In the last job I had, the dept. designed, developed, and deployed training for hotel employees, be it utilizing existing resources, like training videos, online, classroom training, and individual consultations. I was able to take a two-week classroom training class down to one with all of the pre-work that needed to be accomplished first. There was also post-work that needed to be completed before they were certified.

The key was that all of the training was handled by instructional designers who were trained professionally and worked with subject matter experts on each topic. It took almost a year to convert the class content into blended learning.

That is the thing: it takes time, finances, expertise, and training in order to create a successful training process. With COVID-19, it appears that “distance learning” has been thrown into a pot, along with the teachers and students. That doesn’t make for a successful mix.

Over the past ten years, I have taken a number of distance learning classes from a local community college just for the pleasure of continuing education. In all cases the instructors were experienced with distance learning and had their own systems worked out: how to manage instruction, how to organize student participation, how to give grades and feedback, how to administer exams. No two used exactly the same model, so I think they must have worked out their own processes over time, even if they had some basic structures and software tools to build on.

The day I read about schools suddenly going to a distance learning model, I thought, that’s not going to be an easy transition. It’s not a bit like moving your project team meeting (of a group of professional adults) from a conference room plus Polycom or video to Zoom. Whoever thinks you can just move a classroom online hasn’t been paying attention.

I know both students and teachers who have given up trying to make it work. That is really sad—and very disturbing. This hiatus in orderly instruction is going to tell on the current student generation probably all their lives, don’t you think?

I think if it’s just for a year most of the kids will catch back up.

I think if it’s longer, the kids who are struggling will have a very hard time getting up to speed and will be left back a year or even have some permanent affects.

I think any learning or maintaining of skills is helpful during this time.

I think the pressure on families that have parents who both work outside of the home (or the one parent if it’s a single parent) must be horrible if the children are under the age of 12.

My daughter is a senior in high school and while they have the option to be in-person one week and remote the next (rotating), she opted to just go fully remote to be safe. She could see her classmates on social media, hanging in large groups, no masks, so she decided not to risk it. Two weeks into school, they had to send everyone home, fully remote, for two weeks, because a few kids tested positive. After that, only about 25% of the students chose to return to in-person.

It’s been going well for my daughter. She likes that she can sleep later and just focus on the work and none of the usual high school drama. She’s in a lucky position though because she’s very digitally literate, we are lucky enough to own multiple computers and devices, and she has experience with this. At the end of ninth grade she developed terrible migraines so we switched her to an online high school in California for all of tenth grade so we could get to the bottom of her medical issues.

I am teaching ten classes this Fall. Three asynchronous online, two remote, and five hybrid where we meet in-person one-day-a-week and asynchronous remote the rest of the week. This is across four different colleges/universities on three different learning management systems (Canvas, Brightspace, and Blackboard), using two different video systems (Zoom, Webex) — and this is nine different subjects (only one repeat class).

I’m on my 27” iMac and iPad and iPhone six days a week, eight hours a day. My office is set up like Penelope from Criminal Minds for Pete’s sake.

I usually teach six classes across two schools, but took on extra work because my wife was laid off (from another college) due to COVID.

I’m lucky in that I teach digital stuff (visual design, web design) and my side gig has been online teaching anyway — so I’m pretty equipped for this. It’s still bananas and I miss seeing my students regularly. When I do see them, I’m in a mask and face shield and can’t leave the front of the room, so it’s not the same.

Most of my students have adapted well, but there’s a couple who are really struggling with this model.

I think people need to keep in mind that even before covid some children had trouble in school or in some subjects. Or, they might have hit a wall in learning even if everything was normal now and covid didn’t exist.

Like some kids do great in English class until they have to map sentences. Some kids do great in math until they take a geometry class. Some kids do great in science until they take a chemistry class.

Some difficulties might be being blamed on remote learning that might have happened anyway.

Plenty of children do very well homeschooling before covid and now.