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Ginia Bellafante, The New York Times observes, Leaving children to teach themselves from a sofa might be the greatest untold tragedy of the pandemic.
What Zoom learning cannot transmit is a teacher’s exuberance. Children need to feel championed.
Photo: Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
Early in the year, before the pandemic subjected millions of children to a precarious but necessary experiment, Wendy Poveda, the principal of P.S 132, an elementary school in Washington Heights, realized that some of her students were absent a lot because they didn’t have clean clothes. Living in shelters or overcrowded apartments with little access to major appliances, they felt ashamed. Ms. Poveda quickly came up with a simple but novel solution — she installed a laundry room outside the cafeteria.
This was just another example of her flexibility. Where other administrators might founder, Ms. Poveda would meet her students where their needs were greatest. During classes disrupted by the pandemic, she got them iPads and other supplies quickly, but she also paired aides to check in with children and their families every day; she sent whiteboards home and arranged the day around a lot of instruction and teacher contact so that the experience of distance learning would not feel like a joyless trip to a strange place, without an itinerary.
“Asynchronous learning,’’ a common experience of the Covid era in which children are left to this or that unsupervised assignment, too often choosing Mario Kart over spelling workbooks, was de-emphasized at P.S. 132. Although 90 percent of Ms. Poveda’s students are enrolled remotely full-time, the school has consistently achieved a 93 percent attendance rate...
Over the summer, when the city offered parents the chance to send their children to school or keep them home in front of the computer, they were provided what was in many cases a false choice. Some principals encouraged families to choose remote learning when at least students would get extended contact with actual teachers online. In the case of older children, if they selected a hybrid program, they might be in front of an actual teacher only a few hours a week. As one parent of a teenager put it to me, “the schedule was so lame no one would choose it.” This is in large part why the number of distance learners in the system is so high...
What children ultimately need and what the deadening constraints of Zoom learning cannot adequately transmit is exuberance; children need to feel championed. “They need people to see what they are doing, to cheer them on, to rally them to care and respond,” Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and one of the country’s best-known experts on literacy told me.
Source: The New York Times
