How much do you think the pandemic hurt your child academically?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not at all. Thank goodness for us knowing scientists who told us early on to form a bubble, having nannies, and working from home. It really allowed us to spend more time with our kids than we usually get and though we're not teachers we were able to pick up where online teaching left off each day and drum in what the kids had been taught.

I sincerely regret not forming a pod or hiring a nanny. Remember in 2020 when we were castigated about “pod privilege”? Good times.

Yeah, we already had a nanny who we paid full time and just had a lot of free time during the school day, so this was a switch for them, but at least it was in place. Dh and I had both already occasionally worked from home (maybe one or two days a week) so that wasn't a shock either. We bought an inflatable bounce house, another person in our pod bought a trampoline, and the kids had fun stuff to do in backyards that way. I remember in 2020 seeing the yellow Caution tape around climbing structures at neighborhood playgrounds. That made my heart sink.

[Anonymous]

Child #1 Academically, not a bit. Mental health wise, she got so depressed I thought we might lose her. Luckily, she and I are very close, she confided her painful thoughts, and we were able to get her the help she needed. She's good now.

Child #2 Didn't even blink He was and is totally fine

The young students I taught? They struggled. The next year, some were okay, some struggled. This past year was so horrible, I quit mid year. I was afraid every day that a kid was going to seriously hurt me. I suspect that out of desperation, and through no fault of their own, parents just put kids in front of screens all day every day. Some parents were so afraid of covid in the community I taught in they almost never left their homes for 2 years. Kids with disabilities did not get EI because parents were too afraid. And many, many people who saw our early childhood classrooms remarked on the similarity to a psych ward. Kids were/are severely disturbed and I don't know if they'll ever recover mentally and emotionally. And I know the kids from preK coming up are just as screwed up. They run around the classrooms, jump off furniture, bite staff and draw blood, scream profanities, destroy class libraries (my friend took every thing she owned in the room home so it wouldn't get ripped).

I think we faced a lose-lose situation and now we're all paying for it. I don't really think public schools are equipped to deal with the fall out. If I did, I might have stayed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My sister in law is a public school ELA teacher and brought a stack of essays with her to my house as she’s staying over because her water heater flooded her apartment. I perused though some of them out of curiosity. She teaches the 8th grade. Some of these kids write like they are in elementary school. Serious and consistent spelling mistakes (read is raed, you are is ur, mention is mensin etc), failure to write more than 2 sentences for a 500 word essay, run on sentences, poor punctuation etc. She told me most of the kids are very behind and a good number should not proceed to high school. She said that in the last 3 years the overall quality of the work the kids are producing is down. How much do you think the pandemic hurt your child academically?

Not nearly as much as everyone else. We withdrew them from public and homeschooled during the fully online year. Kids were accelerated in reading and math when we re-enrolled them back into the school. Our school district does a good job identifying and offering academic support to students who still haven't caught up in the form of summer school and lots of free or low-cost after school programs. It works because the students and their parents put in the effort to catch up. I really think if certain kids haven't caught up by now their parents have to get real and stop blaming it on the pandemic. They've had two full summer breaks to catch up.

[Anonymous]

My kid can only waddle backwards and forgot how to tie his shoes. Huge blow to solar system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Child #1 Academically, not a bit. Mental health wise, she got so depressed I thought we might lose her. Luckily, she and I are very close, she confided her painful thoughts, and we were able to get her the help she needed. She's good now.

Child #2 Didn't even blink He was and is totally fine

The young students I taught? They struggled. The next year, some were okay, some struggled. This past year was so horrible, I quit mid year. I was afraid every day that a kid was going to seriously hurt me. I suspect that out of desperation, and through no fault of their own, parents just put kids in front of screens all day every day. Some parents were so afraid of covid in the community I taught in they almost never left their homes for 2 years. Kids with disabilities did not get EI because parents were too afraid. And many, many people who saw our early childhood classrooms remarked on the similarity to a psych ward. Kids were/are severely disturbed and I don't know if they'll ever recover mentally and emotionally. And I know the kids from preK coming up are just as screwed up. They run around the classrooms, jump off furniture, bite staff and draw blood, scream profanities, destroy class libraries (my friend took every thing she owned in the room home so it wouldn't get ripped).

I think we faced a lose-lose situation and now we're all paying for it. I don't really think public schools are equipped to deal with the fall out. If I did, I might have stayed.

They are nothing like psych wards and these kids has issues because of the adults behavior.

[Anonymous]

I work at a public school and the quality of work within the same classroom is a wide wide range
Unfortunately more and more kids in the US come from families with low or no education. It’s a combination of generational poverty and mass immigration that is very poorly controlled. And even then the variation in kids from similar SES backgrounds is astounding.

[Anonymous]

I don’t think my kid was impacted. If anything, staying home made him more chill. I made sure he did math and stayed on track, he is naturally good at ELA, and the rest doesn’t matter much, he has caught up.
Socially I never did any fear mongering, we traveled, including to places not obsessed with masking, and he continued seeing friends and family.
It also helped that he is an introvert and pretty independent in terms of human interaction. I think he did feel a bit more lonely than usual and normal but he bounced back.

[Anonymous]

My kids managed and came out ok. They're both very self-motivated so did fine on the academic side. I'm sure it's not what it could have been though. But as teenagers they missed out on some important things socially. Millions of kids had it worse.

But in retrospect, closing public schools for a year and a half - while privates were allowed to stay open, not to mention all of red America - was disastrous. Just read some of the comments here. We collectively decided to throw public school kids under the bus. Unforgivable. A complete societal failure.

[Anonymous]

It hit my low-income immigrant students hard.

[Anonymous]

I don’t think it is just the pandemic’s effect. The truth is we also merged tech and education durinf the pandemic and it is still merged as many kids have mandated time in computers at school starting in Prek. If you know anything about dopamine levels during screen usage particularly a leveled game which most edutainment games use, you know these can be addictive. Not only are pandemic children coming off a major disruptive life effect they also are expected to be able to regulate their brain immediately after getting off of an old or electronic game. They really aren’t getting a chance to heal from covid because of the introduction of tech.

I’m not even mentioning the use of social media outside of school. There are 4 year olds watching YouTube and tik tok!

[Anonymous]

My kids were fine because we shelled out 1000s a month so they could be in "pods." The online school part was a joke, but they had consistent socialization, which in my opinion is more important.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It did not. However socially, it did.

Same

[Anonymous]

6th grader was im 3rd when it hit and was always ahead academically. He's fine.

3rd grader was in K and always needed to work harder academically. She has had to work extra hard this year to catch up on reading ,and she's finally getting there.

[Anonymous]

The spelling and grammar issues you noted aren’t necessarily pandemic related, depending on where she lives. Districts that haven’t taught phonics or spelling in the last 10-20 years have eighth graders who can’t spell or write properly. My 9th grader hasn’t written anything of substance since 5th grade! Writing is not something that FCPS seems to focus on, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that kids are terrible at it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kids managed and came out ok. They're both very self-motivated so did fine on the academic side. I'm sure it's not what it could have been though. But as teenagers they missed out on some important things socially. Millions of kids had it worse.

But in retrospect, closing public schools for a year and a half - while privates were allowed to stay open, not to mention all of red America - was disastrous. Just read some of the comments here. We collectively decided to throw public school kids under the bus. Unforgivable. A complete societal failure.

I agree with the second paragraph but will say that some private schools also closed for that long, so it is that we collectively threw kids under the bus. And I agree it was a failure.