1) Teaching via proxy is hard, because teaching is not merely data mastered or skills repeated, but connection. Connection is most easily formed when we experience it via relationship. We can open cookbooks and read recipes, we can watch videos and practice techniques, but there’s something to working with a master, that makes mastering a skill more. The same is true with any other subject. In many subjects, in most subjects, learning comes easier with others in the mix. Children all across the country are aching for that more, that mix.
Think of the most moving examples of Zoom effectiveness we’ve seen; the orchestras and choirs. They revealed connectedness between individuals, working to one end, the production of a finished piece. Perhaps we need to require all those students to use their phones and connect with each other as a way of helping each other on, sharing their gifts, and the push and pull that normally takes place in the classroom. Perhaps we need to give the opportunity for that more by our being with them and bringing them out of isolation via the demands of instruction. We've become the facilitators of community or must be.
2) There is a difference between learning and working and that difference is measured in enthusiasm toward the subject itself. My son with Down Syndrome loves his math class where they are using calculators to facilitate number recognition. He’s mastered it sufficiently to recognize the code we use on the television and order himself Monster’s University and Scoob! before I realized he knew how to rent a movie. In reading class, they’re doing a chapter book one chapter a day, and he sits for the reading, but the quizzes indicate, he’s just putting in the time. The difference was illustrated to me, $3.99 at a time.
3) We are made for community, and anything short of it, is Folger's Crystals. We know it’s not butter. The Zoom meetings help my younger ones, as do the phone calls and Facetimes, but it’s not what we want. The other day, I drove to Jiffy Lube to get service and sit in my car while it happened and the mechanic in a mask engaged me in a long conversation about teaching, about the summer and Corona. Leaving from the appointment, I felt oddly refreshed and realized, we pine for conversation, for incidental encounters, for community and all three of these things are limited by the nature of staying at home and all the precautions we must take to keep everyone everyone loves safe.
4) Expectations don’t need to be low. They merely need to be clear. Yes, students and families are stressed as never before, but school and academics provide an anchor that isn’t there otherwise, of ordinariness in an extraordinary time. Students need the component of consistency academics give to a world that seems increasingly unpredictable. What students learn now in this time away from the classrooms may be the most important lessons we teach –that we care, that we’re here for them, and that we want them to challenge themselves even when the world is challenging.
5) Education is as much about connection as it is about introducing them to new thoughts. Everyone shares something of a common bond, as we all have been affected by the stay at home orders of our communities. We can teach about the importance of communities –the need for good civil leadership and laws, philosophies and principles, (government), the need for good health and hygiene systems (science and p.e and health), the consequences of supply and demand capitalism and finances and the interpretation of statistics (math, economics, more complex math), and the necessity of the arts. For what are we all starved for in this long isolation? Entertainment. We want beauty, we want art, we want comedy, we want escape from the boredom, we want the catharsis of story; (Yes, English and Art and Music and Theatre) which are of course, all my loves.
Everything is grist for the mill of the craft of teaching, and right now, giving students the gifts of these subjects we love. Our biggest task, is somehow conveying our love of those subjects through Zooms, slides and phone calls. Ultimately, our whole task as educators, is to keep strengthening the bonds of community forged through class and the classroom, whether virtual or actual, by what we do.
No comments:
Post a Comment