Is there a better way to do school during an ongoing, quite possibly never-ending pandemic AND with climate crisis coming home to roost?
Christina Virgil, on TikTok discussed the problem with schools making attendance their highest priority, and highlighted the sentiments of Jim the Hermit:
"Thing is, education does matter, but then so does staying healthy and alive. So this is another reason why 'let Covid rip' can't work as a strategy. We're producing a generation that will be either poorly educated because they didn't go to school or disabled because they did."
Except, of course, for those wealthy enough to be able to use private schools that enlist all possible mitigations or keep their children home with a private tutor. That generational line will be just fine.
It seems likely that we'll have ongoing waves of new variants for some time. Demanding that kids go to school sick seems like the rock bottom worst option. Absolutely we have to stop transmission in schools. 100 million percent! I wrote about that a couple months ago: "Give all the kids and staff N95s and clean the air so everyone is safer in the building and then just watch the "absenteeism" plummet!"
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| Compare teacher absences to other fields. It's not just kids getting sick!! |
But just in case we don't do that - or don't do it well, and kids keep getting sick with a disease that can cause lifelong disability, maybe we need to re-design teaching to openly acknowledge that we're living during a pandemic and climate change.
I'm in favour of some type of virtual school continuing as part of each board and/or a total re-working of school and our expectations around how it works. I'm speaking only of high school here (and a little about university) because I don't know jack shit about primary school beyond the experiences my own kids had with it.
We love re-working how we teach kids, so what's the problem??
I mean, with flipped learning, we've got kids learning lessons at home, then doing homework in class to get help reinforcing the lessons. They could easily do homework at home too and just email for a quick video conference if they need help.
But we're also supposed to be doing differentiated instruction (meet kids where they're at and teach from then, working with their individual strengths), so shouldn't we already be designing learning to suit the needs of each student individually??
Clinical psychologist Naomi Fisher wrote on this huge attendance concern a few days ago explaining that she thinks education is so important that we can't afford to keep going in this direction:
"Let's imagine that we have 100% attendance. Every child is in school. The sick ones, the unhappy ones, the ones who have just lost their parent or grandparent. The ones who are only just four and can't quite manage a whole day yet without a nap. They're all in. What would happen? What would be happening in those school buildings which was so amazing that it would be worth the suffering and distress it would take to insist on everyone being there? What is it that is so crucially important in school that we should prioritise attendance over everything else, and no matter what suffering it causes? As someone who missed a lot of school, I'd really like to know.
For from my perspective, it looks like learning can happen everywhere, and that being put behind a desk in a classroom isn't necessary the most ideal learning environment. Certainly it's not one that most adults seek out. If it was such a great way to learn, wouldn't we be reproducing it for adults? Wouldn't adults be saying 'I can't wait to spend a few days in a classroom, absorbing all that learning again, I've never learnt as much since I left school?' Instead they tend to say things like 'I only really started learning when I left school' or 'Don't do that, it reminds me of school' or even 'I thought I was stupid at school, wasn't until later I realised I was actually quite clever'. Why, when most adults know that school wasn't the only place for them to learn, and that they would not wish to go through those years again, do we insist in repeating the mantra that children must attend 100% of the time? What will 100% ever achieve except pressure and misery?"
I agree that education is so important, and if we just ignore the very real changes in our world to insist education happen in a desk in a school, we're not doing kids any favours. It's tricky to find that line between sheltering them from scary things in our world and being open and honest, but they know about Covid. Talking about it and telling them how to protect themselves and their families can make it less scary. And openly acknowledging that people are away because they're sick or grieving a loss in their family or avoiding this horrible disease is part of that. But before we can do that, teachers and admin need to be brave enough to acknowledge this reality.
Does anyone else keep thinking about that 1986 cartoon about a nuclear attack on the UK, When the Wind Blows? A middle aged couple just keeps trying to go about their normal lives as they succumb to radiation poisoning, worried about the cushions getting dirty, the state of the front garden, and making tea.
"I wonder if there's any radiation about.
Well, I can't see anything. . . . If you can't see it and can't feel it, it can't be doing you any harm, can it?"
It's not nearly so bad as that, but we are largely ignoring a virus with devastating long term effects.
For admin to make change possible, we have to come clean on why governments are pushing attendance. It's not because it's the only way to learn. I know that good attendance is correlated to good grades, but that's the answer to a different question. Obviously when the only option for school is butts in chairs, kids who show up do better. But if there are other options and other ways to teach and learn, we might reach more kids. It might not just help the kids doing well despite how much they might be quietly (or noisily) suffering in the building, but the kids who can't stand it so much they can't drag themselves in the door. And it can help the kids who can't make it because they're sick or because they're isolating because they're still contagious and actually care about not transmitting this hellish disease. And it can help the kids who just aren't able to focus when they're surrounded by sick kids during a pandemic or when their mom can no longer feed herself and needs their help. All sorts of kids could benefit from more options.
So if they're not pushing attendance for the sake of kids, what's it for? A big part is babysitting and policing. We keep the little ones safe while their parents work, and we keep the big ones out of trouble. That has to be separated from teaching. That means paid sick days for parents to stay home with kids, and more options for parents to work from home as needed, and it means more social programs for families and kids in need. It means a livable basic income!
Beyond that, if you want teenagers to want to do school, they need to be able to envision some kind of job that actually exists and that they could realistically get. When good entry-level jobs become scarce - the kind of jobs that enable them to move out and live on their own - some kids will work their asses off knowing the competition will be fierce. Others will leave knowing they'll never make the cut. When there aren't enough jobs to go around that pay a living wage, then school looks less and less appealing for the less academically inclined at the best of times. Throw in the reality that you could get seriously ill from going to school and not find gainful employment after literally risking your life to be there, and it's amazing so many still go at all.
We can't solve the economic structure, but if we keep remote teaching as part of the classroom so that kids are attached to their schools and can more easily stay home as required, then if some kids are kept at home to learn, the numbers of the bodies in the room is reduced along with the chance of transmission! It also works with our current funding formula that's tied to attendance. If logging in from home counts, then attendance will be 100%! And if admin doesn't count it - can't count it - what if teachers just start marking them present - at least once every 15 days to keep them enrolled? Or what if teachers tell them to step a toe inside the classroom door for a second every 15 days so they're able to honestly mark them present, yet enable them to get the credit from home??
It's not ideal, but schools have to start using some work-arounds if we hope to continue educating all the kids during a pandemic.
Some will worry that everyone will stay home if we let them, but they won't. I'd estimate that a good 70% of kids actually enjoy coming to school and going to class, even if only to see the other students in there. Let the 30% who find the whole thing abysmal work from home. Is it more important that they're learning or that they did that in-person group work project??
I'll get to the problems with forced collaboration another day, but the upshot is that so much of what is said to be vital training in school is bullshit. Some of it always was a big lie, but some just recently became a lie as people try hard to ignore the state of the world and keep on the same path that worked in a very different and increasingly distant path. I've never had a job in which I was put into groups to figure something out together, within the next 20 minutes, to then present solutions. Any collaboration I've done - and it's very minimal - always comes long after we had materials and time to think about the new information and form a position and ideas. When working in groups with teachers, just like students, some won't have looked at the materials at all yet and others will be ready to dive in to implement it all. The ones who didn't do it yet are always able to just follow along with the nerdy kids who prepared a multi-coloured powerpoint. And sometimes the slackers end up getting promoted! In the "real world" you can too hand things in late and people will accept it. There are few jobs where you're fired for being a little slower to finish or for letting others lead the way, especially now when so much of the workforce is sick or on disability. Sure, there are Amazon factories that don't let you take bathroom breaks, but that's not so much a job as indentured servitude because we've allowed labour rights to be decimated.
Screw the extra stuff. We need to teach kids skills and content and actually test them against a standard and not test how many things they did or how long it took them to do it. My time as a student again has made that crystal clear. I lost four people I cared about, family and friends, within eight months, and not only did I lose marks for missing classes, I had to fight to be allowed to stay in the program despite submitting every assignment on time. I've complained about that at length before.
If the content we're looking for is what WWII was all about, if that's a thing we all agree all students should know in order to be granted a high school diploma, and if they listened to the lessons but weren't well enough to do that "write a letter home from the trenches" assignment or the unit test, then skip those and just bloodly ask them: What was WWII all about? Then give them a mark on that. I was a hard ass on lots of things, but I could always find a way around extenuating circumstances. The key is to keep your eyes on the prize: it's never about if they followed the rules and did all the things; it's always about to what extent they understand the material and can explain it or apply it. When I taught Civics, I'd have one or two kids each year who's mark was just based on my well-crafted final exam. One year a student failed the final, and I stopped him in the hallway and asked him all the questions on it, and he could answer them competently. If they could pass that but did nothing prior, that's good enough for me. It means they know enough to say they understand most of what went on even if they never participated in that parliament role play (which was a lot of fun for a lot of kids, and for me, but I know some kids avoided class to avoid the organized chaos).
One problem is the "sliders." There will always be kids who will take advantage of the situation and do the least work possible. There were some kids who cheated and charmed their way through. The same tactic can be taken with them. Just ask them to answer some questions about the content to see if they check enough boxes to pass. It doesn't have to be nearly as complicated as we make it out to be. And let's keep asking for a pass/fail report card instead of assigning numbers.
Sometimes we resort to counting tasks when it's hard to evaluate against a standard or we just haven't figured out how to evaluate it. There's an arbitrary nature to evaluation, even in maths and sciences, but there's tons of leeway in the humanities. How many social scientists or philosophers should they have to know to pass? If they can't keep Freud and Jung straight, but can explain operant conditioning beautifully with all the pitfalls and benefits, is that a level 3? The curriculum suggests what to teach, but it doesn't clarify how much needs to be demonstrated. Pick a point, and have some exit interview questions at the ready if it's not clear.
If it won't change from the top down (which I don't think it will with this inane provincial government that keeps getting voted in), then it needs to change from the bottom up, with teachers ignoring any rules that harm children in order to focus on students learning in any way possible instead of students attending.
And we need to slow down, stop rushing them through in four years, to make learning as much as possible more important than graduating as fast as possible. Kids want to rush through, for sure, but would they want to escape this institution as quickly if it were more about discovery and enlightenment and less about following rules precisely and doing this specific thing at this time and in this way?
And a little piece of me has come to believe that maybe none of this is as important as we think, and just maybe we need the entire curriculum to be changed to focus on understanding how we're feeling with everything falling apart around us. The children know, you know.
They always know.
What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade, by Brad Aaron Modlin
"Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather'svoice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else--something important--and how to believe
the houseyou wake in is your home. This promptedMrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one personadd up to something."
***
Well-fitting N95s reduce transmission by about 95% - even higher if everyone wears them; cleaning the air helps by about 30%, and vaccines reduces hospitalization by 60%. Put together, we could ALL be 99.999% protected from this mess!
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