A reporter from Mashable reached out with some questions about my tweet from last week. One of her questions is a whole body of work by itself, so I’m adding more thoughts that wouldn’t fit in her article [link to come].
4.) I’d love to hear more about your entire lower left quadrant. How did the pandemic change school in a way you want it to maintain? Why don’t you think it’s likely to happen?
There are plenty of exceptionally social students for whom pandemic ruined their experience of school this year. Loads of high school students fall into this category, as does my second-grade daughter.
Additionally, there are loads of students who have flourished with the absence of the distracting (and sometimes overwhelming) classroom environment, like my Kindergarten son. He’s plowed through several years worth of math instruction, but he will likely struggle for the remainder of this year to adjust to the structure of a classroom environment and the expectations that come with it. Today, he was upset because they played Simon Says for too long, and when he’s at home, he can quit stuff whenever he wants.
For both of those groups of students, we teachers have had to adjust our academic expectations and ask questions we’ve been able to avoid for years.
- What’s the minimum amount for a student to show mastery of a topic?
- How do we know if they’ve mastered the topic, and what do we do if they don’t?
- What’s the purpose of high-stakes assessments, and are there other ways to get the same information?
- Is there a pattern for which students are doing well and which ones are struggling with remote learning?
For teachers like me, the social dynamic and the academic one are inseparable, and we’re hustling, finding ways to adequately and accurately teach students whose learning environment might be distracting, unreliable, or otherwise inequitable.
The kids in my house have won the Privilege Bingo; we have plenty of art supplies, books, reliable Internet, quiet places to work, and two parents who work reasonable hours and can be involved in the kids’ schooling, so my family is going to be fine. The other students will be disproportionately affected by a this year, where schools were unable to serve them.
And all these students will be in the same classes as my kids next year, so how do teachers adjust our expectations to include everybody, while providing extra for the students that need it?
It’s going to take more than a snazzy app to create fair conditions as classes return to school buildings.
There are plenty of education companies chomping at the bit to cash in on “learning loss”, which many educators (including me) consider to be a fallacy.
Like Pavlov’s dog, journalists salivated at every release of data/study on “learning loss”—which was then used to argue schools should reopen for “struggling Black/Brown Ss.” Yet how grief/trauma hinders learning for those same Ss losing family to Covid mostly omitted in stories.
— melinda d. anderson (@mdawriter) March 24, 2021
No students “lost“ anything in the last year, but we will need to provide accommodations for every student, even kids like mine who logged in every day and did the work.
I haven’t really suggested any solutions here, because a windfall of Education funding is unlikely to drop from the sky. If the state superintendent called me up, I’d suggest smaller class sizes, more adults in classes, and two free meals for every child, K-12 before we get to classroom culture training, hiring full-time implicit bias and racism instructors, and moving the start time later in the day for High School students.
Since that phone call is unlikely to happen, I need to be ready for my local schools readjusting the funding that we have to make do.
And here’s the tough pill for some middle-class, white families to swallow:
As a parent, I must be prepared for our neighborhood school to allocate resources toward groups of students who don’t/didn’t have the resources at home that my kids do. Dr. Tyrone C. Howard defined equity as “giving more to students who have historically gotten less,” and privileged families like me need to be enthusiastically in favor of these measures, since we’re all living in the same world.
Inequity anywhere is a threat to equity everywhere.
~Matt “Willing to sacrifice a little, because my kids are going to be fine” Vaudrey
