A Second Reaction to Teaching from Home

I began teaching from home four weeks ago. I'll be teaching from home for eight more weeks. I will not return to my classroom until at least September.

My grade level, subject, and students make distance teaching about as doable for me as anyone in public education. My roster is exclusively Advanced Placement, and exclusively 11th and 12th grade. My roster is entirely regular education with the exception of a few who are identified as gifted and talented. I'm humbled knowing that the task of teachers with younger students, and less able students, on their rosters have a much harder job to accomplish.

I'm becoming increasingly aware of the limitations distance learning presents. I need to more formally plan because the element of improvisation that's possible in the classroom is out of the question. There are a lot of sound techniques such as reciprocal learning that aren't at my disposal. Also, quick one-on-one conversations and corrections cannot happen. Quality one-on-one conversation, though, can still take place (it's just more tedious to set up).

The experience is akin to not having the use of a hand.

We were almost ready for this moment. And by we I mean public educators of students grades K-12. In a district like mine, access to the technology making this possible was there for the overwhelming majority of kids. Time working with the tools had been adequate but not thorough. The training of how to teach remotely was in progress. The mindset making this possible is emerging. I think a lot of us will learn a great deal about being good teachers in these circumstances.

And that's a good thing because a feature of the post-Coronavirus world will likely be an educational world filled with more interruptions. There will be more tolerance for parents wishing to withhold kids' from school when they're worried for their health and safety. Response to dangerous weather or threats at the school house might now be met with short-term shut downs. Teaching and learning from home will become a regular though intermittent feature.

We may be due for a political recalculation about what schools can and should do. Federal and state law protects the rights and access of students with disabilities, and it's hard if not impossible to strictly obey those mandates during distance learning. There's legal and political expectations for meals to students from less fortunate families. There's legal requirements requiring the reporting and monitoring of substance abuse and mental wellness which schools cannot adequately do at this time. School health offices are checkpoints for various immunizations and physical checks. Now a lot of these measures haven't been adequately funded for years. Is there the will to raise funding to make sure those protections are still in place off campus.

And funding leads to the final observation I wish to make here, about how almost ready we were for this moment. Less fortunate districts serving less fortunate areas didn't have nearly the tools I had at my disposal when school was closed. Chromebooks and access to the internet would go a long way in bridging that gap in impoverished areas. Now that a $2 trillion stimulus has become normalized, are we ready to make incremental changes to how robustly we'll fund the less fortunate areas of our country.

The taxpayers of my district hired me with the expectations I would teach a whole school year and deliver instruction to the best of my ability. The closure of school means I won't do as good of a job as I otherwise would, but I'm minimizing the loss pretty darned well. And the tools available to me help me do just that, making it less likely that this is a lost year for my students. But as a nation we're weren't as ready for this moment as we could've been, and for many students this will be a lost year. I hope we can readjust what we think is worthy of our nation's resources and be more mostly ready for the next time.