Really?
Granted, many public schools don't reach the ideal but: 1. (at least in middle school) students are still working on their vocabulary and reading skills and unless reading allowed (or their parents are hovering over them) are missing corrections, 2. history and literature classes (particularly as you move up) are about discussion and critical thought, 3. testing done in a way to prevent cheating (you can be sure that if there's a 50/50 part of the intime will be used to test, not learn), 4. art and music 5. in languages, the pronunciation is particularly important, 6. socialization, 7. math probably lends itself easiest to zoom (and as a result distance learning as well since you can stick everyone in pods) but even then there's corrections and interchange the students learn from, 8. in science lab work and 9. the chance to ask questions (sure, some teachers do zoom office hours, but this is one of the largest source of complaint from the unions).
"Necessity is the mother of invention". I'm hopeful some good will come out of this.
Here are five ways that COVID-19 could change education for the better.
greatergood.berkeley.edu
"But COVID is a chance for us to fundamentally rethink our system. Barr said it well: “COVID is presenting a unique opportunity in education. For the first time in 150 years, we get to blow up the industrial model of education. We are given the gift of learning because we want to learn—not because we have to learn.”
Once stay-at-home orders are lifted, students at more traditional schools might chafe at coming back to the less autonomous model of schools and fight for more academic freedom. In addition, teachers may not want to go back to the set curricula they had to follow before. Crisis breeds disruption and innovation—and often creates a future that was
possible before but
impractical pre-crisis. In other words, once people experience something different, it can often be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
Because American school policy is so decentralized, there’s a high likelihood the response and possible transformations will vary widely. We’ll see different approaches state by state, district by district, school by school, and even principal to principal. Unfortunately, many schools—perhaps most—will more or less return to the old ways. At others, perhaps, we’ll see fundamental and far-sighted change, planting seeds that will take decades to grow.
My sincere hope is that looking back in twenty years, we can laugh with our kids and say “Yes, we did do that in school before… I know it did not make any sense, but it took COVID to help us make that change.”
Maybe we will start designing school and learning experiences to set our students up for the future instead of holding them back to the past. If there was ever a catalyst to jumpstart change we are living in it right now."