Don’t lump them in with the urban unions
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First, some background….
Occasionally over the past year, I’ve had opportunity to observe my grandkids online learning.
One “pod” of grandkids is enrolled in a private DC parochial school … the other pod is enrolled in suburban Baltimore County public schools.
In common, both the private and public schools relied heavily on virtual (online) learning.
For the public school kids, up until a couple of weeks ago, all course work was online. Now, there’s a hybrid mix of online and “at school” learning.
For the private school kids, hybrid learning kicked in very early (last fall) with a “bias” towards in school learning … but, the school provided an all online option for parents who resisted the at school option … and there were a couple of weeks when the school had to resort to all online.
OK, so what did I observe?
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> First, teachers were faced with a formidable challenge.
For most (all?) instructing online was what’s euphemistically known as a “developmental opportunity” … that is, something that they hadn’t done before and hadn’t been trained to do.
Early on, technical snafus were frequent and time-consuming, but they got worked out.
Teachers had to wear two hats — being prepped for both online and in person teaching … and, be ready to turn on a dime when administrators announced new rules & regs.
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> Second, all of the teachers that I saw in action — private & public — consistently demonstrated a constructive, positive attitude online.
They were well prepared for each session, they took the technical glitches in stride and tried their best to keep all their zoomed students engaged.
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> Third, teachers had to scale back the curriculum to deliver it online.
That’s not a criticism of the teachers … it’s a reality of online education.
We’ll have more on that in later posts…
The Homa Files 
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