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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Teachers:  you are paid to do a job.  If you are upset because you have to assist with blowing noses - teaching young children is not for you.  Please, we know now how you truly feel in your heart about children.

Further - you have all of us inadequate (by yoUr standards) parents by the “proverbial” you know what’s - and for that matter, our kids’ education -
and you chose to walk.  Duly noted.

You won.  Our kids have gone 8 months without you.

Please quit.  Unemployment lines are waiting.[/quote]

No.  They will continue to teach via distance learning during a pandemic.

Keep throwing a fit if it makes you feel better, though.[/quote]

The "it's a pandemic" excuse goes both ways though. Okay, it's a pandemic, so we've decided we can't do in person school. I don't 100% agree, but I'm not in charge so I'll accept it. But now it's time to figure out how to make DL actually work. It's not working for a lot of grade levels and for a lot of kids. In my house, we find ourselves having to choose between doing DL (technology problems, tons of screen time, kids don't get enough activity/exercise, we have to go over the material again later anyway because the DL sessions aren't really age appropriate and they don't absorb much info) or skipping DL and actually teaching our kids. Increasingly, we just blow off the DL sessions because it's much more effective for us to spend 30 minutes or so going over a concept with one of our kids and the taking them on a walk to the playground and talking about the concepts as we go. Then we reiterate and reinforce in the afternoon using reading time or worksheets. What we are doing is effective. It's also incredibly hard to do while also doing a full-time job (so now I do most of my job at night and on the weekends).

But schools actually could facilitate this better style of learning via DL. Fewer live group sessions, more well-organized packets and assignments, combined with small groups and one-on-ones throughout the week to check on progress. I also think all teachers should be doing periodic meetings with parents or whatever caregiver is overseeing DL to discuss how its going and troubleshoot. Instead, schools are sticking to the totally ineffective schedules and tactics that they came up with last spring, most of which are just a hamfisted way of trying to recreate in-person school inside a video screen. It doesn't work, and in many ways it serves as a distraction from actual learning. I'm not a professional teacher, but I am a parent and professional, and to me it was obvious how we need to alter what we were doing to make it work. It should be obvious to the teachers and administrators, too.

I am also doing a job from home that does not lend itself to WFH. I have had to be creative and come up with different approaches to make it work. I've had to learn new technology or spend my weekend experimenting with different methods for presenting information so that I can still be effective at my job even though it's not in person. It's been challenging but I've stretched and made it work. And if I hadn't, trust that my employer would be on me to figure it out.

So yeah, it's a pandemic. We all have to adapt. Lets see the schools and teachers actually adapt in order to get their jobs done, instead of just blaming parents for the ineffectiveness of DL.[/quote]

Teachers adapted.  Parents haven't.

You need child care.  Pay for it.  You are working and a professional. [/quote]

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