In the previous two posts (see here and here), I have argued that parents as well as grandparents, uncles and aunts who became home-bound teachers during pandemic-driven closures of schools have come to both appreciate and understand teaching as never before.
Sitting with a 10 or 14 year-old at the kitchen table figuring out how to answer the math word problems or parsing teacher-assigned paragraphs in a U.S. history text were generally unfamiliar tasks that stay-at-home parents had to do regularly when schools shut down. Parents pleading with or ordering their children to complete their homework before the home-bound children sat down at the screen to begin the next session of remote instruction is not what many felt they had to do once their children were of age to traipse off to the schoolhouse. But now they do. And many, if not most, parents see teaching hardly like what they had recalled from their own years in school but far more difficult than they had anticipated.
At-home teaching with one or more kids for maybe two hours a day parents have discovered, is hard work involving many decisions. Yet parents do not face, for example,a third grade classroom filled with 30 eight year-olds for six hours a day for thirty-six weeks.
But most parents, grand-parents, uncles, and aunts are not teachers and their only memories of being a student were when they attended school decades CONTINUE READING: The Complexity of Teacher Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
