This is the school year of all school years. I am exhausted and we have not even started school. Well we have but not really. Confused? Me too.
Our school district in Michigan had us set to begin on August 25th. The district plans were to allow students and parents to decide if they wanted virtual school or F2F. My family chose virtual as I am a certified teacher and have actually taught in the school district that my daughter attends. We did not start school on the 25th because we didn’t have computers or teachers. Now, as of today, we have a teacher (thankfully it is the same teacher that she had last year so the relationship is already there) and a computer, but we still have no classwork.
Apparently, the program that we are supposed to be using has become so overloaded that it is slow and is taking more time to import all of the student data in it to begin. We were supposed to have logins for our classes today, which now they say will be Friday, and I think it will be next Tuesday.
I was also surprised to find out that our district has 41% of students doing virtual classes and some nearby districts, it is only 14%. I wonder why there is such a large discrepancy?
I am not in a panic for my daughter to start because there are things that we can do at home or outside to bring the learning to her. We work on telling time and reading. We talk about plants and how they grow. We do a little math while baking something. There are always things that can be done that can allow the connections and build the knowledge.
All of this has been a huge learning curve. Not only for teachers but for parents, grandparents, kids, bus drivers and more. There are things that I am pleased about and some things not so much. But this is the first time that virtual learning on such a massive scale has ever happened.
I wonder what it would look like if this was happening and there was no internet to do virtual school. How would learning be handled? What would be happening in the schools? How would parents handle it?
Hmmm…
Soap Opera 