I have a daughter at Newton South and since September all instruction to date has been on-line.
One of the things that has been a very pleasant surprise is to be able to eavesdrop on classes from time to time. It’s a funny thing to realize that my kid has spent large portions of her last 12 years in classrooms and I have virtually no first hand experience of what that’s been like.
Over the last few months, as I’ve been intermittently listening in, I’ve come away extremely impressed with the style and level and engagement of almost everything I’ve heard from all her teachers in all her classes. Occasionally, particularly in history class, I’ve got totally sucked in to a lesson to the point where I’m ignoring my own work and wishing I could just sign up for the class myself.
Without a doubt this has been an awful year for education along with nearly everything else. Students, parents, teachers, and administrators have all been struggling with education in the time of Covid. Everyone’s frustration level with every thing is at all time high. Despite it all, or maybe because of it all, I’d like to give a shout out to our Newton teachers who seem to me to be doing a remarkable job teaching under a remarkably difficult situation. Thanks
To add to what Jerry said. Talking with teachers at all levels, this is what I hear.
Teaching remotely is easy for some subjects if most of the class is a lecture.
In other subjects, you have to adjust a lot.
Usually a teacher can quickly get feedback from the students’ expressions; on Zoom, you cannot see all the faces at once.
Usually, students work in pairs or in groups and the teacher goes from group to group, guiding, while keeping an ear/eye on the other groups. Who knows what happens when the students are put in Zoom break rooms?
Usually, the teacher will walk around, seeing that the homework has been done and understood. I cannot imagine checking all the homework emails everyday!
As a language teacher, one of the activities I liked the most was to practice speaking about things relevant to the students: either the students volunteered what they themselves did or reported to the class what their partner did the previous day or weekend; or what they would do. The goal was to practice but also to get the students to discover other aspects of their classmates’ life, not necessarily known from their compartmentalized school life. Well, it is hard to practice activities, places to go, verbs and adjectives when nobody goes anywhere and does nothing but Zoom, phone and homework.
Just a few examples of how different teaching remotely is.
Jerry – Thank you for your kind comments. Yes, this is challenging work! My small group of students have been just terrific – working so hard under difficult circumstances. Isabelle points out an important point about the lack of interaction and outside stimulation that this pandemic has imposed on students (and on so many others)
Due to my age and medical history, I will have to continue to teach remotely. I can’t wait for the vaccine so life can return to normal for all of us.
Thank you to the teachers who reached out to admins and asked to cancel the senior event at South, we know we can (always)count on you!