Quarantined and Disrupted
Glanced down at my phone to see who was texting. Today. Middle of the day. It was a former student. Now a teacher herself. Middle school. Why was she texting from work? She’s teaching in person. The text cleared things up.
Quarantined
She was unceremoniously sent home, to quarantine. One of her students is positive.
Disrupted
So she’s already been tested, and with some luck will be negative. But the teacher is home. Class moves to fully remote. They are disrupted. But is this a surprise? They were already doing some weird “in one day, out the next” kind of thing. Maybe every third day? I should ask. And there was weird recorded lessons, or live stream… I don’t know the details. But the class was already disrupted.
Every class in the city has already been disrupted. At best – at best – classes are 50% in person. Every third day is more common than every other day, and there are schools on less frequent rotations than that. Each school is different.
Little side note: this does not mean that each school chose what it thought was best. The DoE’s insistence on a full rotation with daily instruction outside of as well as inside of school, and the UFT’s insistence on “blended learning” straight-jacketed most schools. Some were able to go through the necessary hoops to get “exceptions” accepted – but remember how the first schools that decided they wanted to go remote were shot down? The schools chose, unless the Chancellor wanted them to choose something else.
As September passed, a new disruption developed: many schools offer in building instruction – via the internet. Students, mostly in some high schools, come to school, open a lap top, and zoom into their CONTINUE READING: Quarantined and Disrupted | JD2718