How do you Think of Covid (Distance Learning) Kids?

[wac_432]

I heard an interesting opinion from a teacher friend. She said she is hoping that the "Covid Generation" will pass and she will eventually get kids who were too young to be affected by "distance learning."

I thought that was an interesting and honest assessment; expecting that there is a wave of kids who are less-able to study, focus, and are behind in their education due to distance learning, and that it will pass.

What do most teachers think?

[tnff]

I won't vote in the poll since I'm not a teacher but my youngest was still in college at the time and had three months of distance learning before returning to the classroom in the fall of 2020. My thoughts from that and observations of kids in our community.

a. Distance learning didn't cause problems so much as illuminate them. The kids who cared; parents who cared; still learned and often did better than in the classroom. Those who were self-motivated to learn, learned. Those who didn't want to learn, didn't. And some cheated, and got caught.

b. There will probably be a different answer depending on where the person was at the time. Some schools got back in class in the fall. Others stayed out for a year. Very different impacts.

c. Some schools (our local district did fairly well) adapted very quickly to a distance learning model. Our local district now simply includes distance learning as a routine part of the curriculum.

d. Access to home computers and home internet varied greatly across the country. There were huge percentages of kids who simply did not have good routine access to home computers and internet. Our district provided Chromebooks to those who needed them, but that couldn't put internet into every home. There's a huge population that can't afford internet and even if they have cell phones, can only afford limited data plans.

e. Not all schools had the IT capability to go to distance learning and do it well. They needed money + time + expertise and many districts were lacking all three. So the transition didn't happen quickly or well.

[texasdiver]

I think the effects of COVID were very unevenly distributed.

We live in a relatively affluent district and our daughter attends the local schools. They are largely back to normal. Attendance has largely recovered. The hallways are full of students doing advanced work. AP classes are fully subscribed, kids are all getting into college, and it is very much life as normal. For most of these students, distance learning meant lots of parental engagement to make sure they were staying on track. One hears about higher rates of depression and mental health issues among students but it isn't obvious to me that it represents something new or linked to COVID as opposed to us simply being more attuned to it today.

By contrast, I teach in a poorer area in a school in which 60% of the students are on free or reduced lunch. And the effects of COVID are still hugely apparent. Attendance is still nowhere near where it once was. Basically for 2 years of COVID we taught students and their families that school attendance was optional. Especially when we shifted back to hybrid schools and continued to accommodate every student and family who just didn't want to attend school for whatever specious reason. I teach science and I still have kids entering my classroom without the most basic skills that one used to expect them to learn in middle school. Like the metric system, how to take measurements, how to make a graph, and so forth. For a lot of these students, COVID was just a black hole from which they are still recovering. For many of these students, COVID meant staying home to take care of young siblings while parents worked with little actual learning happening. Or just being left to their own devices. And that isn't a good thing if you are 12, 13, or 14.