What Would Mister Rogers Do?
Based on the feedback I've been receiving and the general online chatter, most of us don't feel that doing school online is working. Children are bored, frustrated, and learning very little. Spending hours a day, seated, indoors, and muted while staring at a screen is the set up for a science fiction dystopia, yet it's happening right now.
My advice to the parents of preschoolers, if they are able, is to simply opt out. If you're sitting with your child as they do online school, you're already doing most of the "work" of the teacher anyway, you're already not getting anything else done, and so you might as well dive into the real deal of homeschooling and the way to do that with preschoolers is to let them play. (I humbly offer the 3000+ posts in my archives as a place to start in figuring out what that means as it will mean something different for every family.)
However, opting out is not an option for many families so the remote learning continues. I'm going to try in this post to talk to teachers and parents about what can be done to make it suck a little bit less.
But first, the rhino head on the table: the problem is the medium, make no mistake about that, yet I want parents to know that much of what you find dissatisfying about so-called "remote learning" is baked into regular in-person schooling as well. The kids are still spending their childhood seated, CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: What Would Mister Rogers Do?