“Remote learning” as it is called, has been a mixed bag for us so far. Our daughter is twelve and much more interested in her friends and gaming than her schoolwork. However she seemed to be on top of it. Every time I asked if she had completed all her assigned work for the day, she answered in the affirmative.
In her mind, that meant she’d done all the work that she’d been able to do. She failed to mention that she was having trouble accessing many of the assignments from many of her classes.
Teachers and school districts are doing their best, but most are relying on a hodgepodge of tools provided (often for free) by private corporations: Google Classroom, Google Drive, instructional videos on YouTube, Zoom for meetings and lectures, etc. It’s great that these tools are available, but using them to assign and complete schoolwork produces a steep learning curve for teachers, students, and parents.
In our case, we ended up near the end of the school year with our daughter on a trajectory to receive no credit for most of her classes. Enter crunch week (which we’re still in): a massive push to wrangle and complete her missing school work.
Hello readers. Just a short post to let everyone know I am alive and how I am dealing with lockdown. Like 99% of the planet I am chilling at home looking at a lot of exponential graphs. In the Bay Area we are beginning to see a flattening of new COVID-19 cases which is cause for cautious optimism. But at this point it could still go either way. I am disheartened by the many failures of our global leaders, not only Trump for his willful ignorance but also China for information suppression. There is plenty of blame to go around.
Book blogger and author Darrell Laurant has