Our Zoom Teacher Keeps Her Camera Off

[Anonymous]

Is this normal? She showed her face the first two days and then stopped. My kid is 9/4th grade. And no, nothing is wrong with our computer, teacher is alive and well, blah blah blah.

[Anonymous]

She probably got up three minutes before class and her hair is a mess.

[Anonymous]

Wow. I’m a teacher and I can’t even imagine what my principal would have said if I tried pulling that this past spring.

[Anonymous]

Not normal and completely unprofessional. Email her and ask her.

[Anonymous]

Does admin ever drop in on these classes? My principal/ vice principal popped in on my lessons all the time in the spring. I found it annoying but I guess they were worried about stuff like this.

[Anonymous]

Summer school?

[Anonymous]

Maybe she lives in a hovel and doesn’t want parents staring at her filthy living room.

In-house zoom must be horrifying for hoarders. I’ve visited a few and you can’t imagine how these people live. They make an effort to dress normally outside but their living situations are just insane.

[Anonymous]

Inappropriate and unprofessional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Inappropriate and unprofessional.

....and a little creepy.

[Anonymous]

We are not required to use video during our Zoom lessons. Neither are the kids after we take attendance.

[Anonymous]

Maybe it helps with bandwidth issues. We do this at work all the time for that reason.

[Anonymous]

Really? I’m a teacher, it would never have crossed my mind to keep my camera off during a lesson. Your child has had three classes, right? Maybe she has a baby who needed to be breastfed at the worst possible time? (If that had been me, I would have come up with some explanation for the kids and emailed parents immediately after the class, but that’s me.)

I would see what happens in the next class. If it happens again, I would email her. I’d probably go with a “don’t know if you know this but your camera is off” route. If the response indicates that she is intentionally keeping it off and plans to continue to do so, I would probably stop sending my kid to the class and let the principal know that, given the likelihood of continued DL this fall, my child wouldn’t do well in this teacher’s class for this reason.

To other parents reading this, please know that most teachers really are trying to think of ways to make DL better than it was this spring. We did what we could with what we had (no autonomy, no preparation); the fall will be better.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We are not required to use video during our Zoom lessons. Neither are the kids after we take attendance.

Common now. It’s bad enough to do DL but teachers turn their video off too. Crazy!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We are not required to use video during our Zoom lessons. Neither are the kids after we take attendance.

Common now. It’s bad enough to do DL but teachers turn their video off too. Crazy!

Kids are not? Our principal asked for kids to have the video on. If teachers are not required then that is a problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe it helps with bandwidth issues. We do this at work all the time for that reason.

Oh, yes! I’m the teacher above and I forgot about this! If she’s on her chromebook the quality significantly decreases when more participants join. Keeping the camera off improves the audio and general quality of the meeting.
I still stand by my previous response though. Email and ask. If she responds that it’s a bandwidth issue, ask her who you should contact at the school to help make sure that all teachers have the appropriate equipment to fix this problem by the fall.
Hint: we need something other than chromebooks or to find a platform that performs better with it.