Wednesday, 29th July, 2020
The BCC Listserve has seen a flurry of emails related to MCPS reopening plans. And form the posts people are most concerned about the start time (7:45am), which is the standard HS start of the day. They are now posting on the MCPS website that classes should start later in the day. Seriously? That is your main concern? How about the fact that students will receive no more than two lessons per class per week instead of five? Of course it has prompted me to write a long response to the Listserv, and while I was at it I proceeded to share with MCPS’s board of education, BCC PTSA, BCC 12thgrade administrator and the two BoE members who had responded to my previous email.
Below is the note wrote to the BoE after the PTSA has recirculated the reopening plans.
Now that it is clear that school will return virtually only in the fall for the entire first semester I am hoping MCPS is rethinking the current version to include more instruction time and ensure students can reach teachers daily if they are stuck with their work. I am writing this based on our now 3 of 5 week summer school experience: Let me walk you through how this looks in reality for pre-calc summer class:
Semester 1 and 2 are taught concurrently
For each class a work pack is send at the beginning of the week which students complete self-paced.
There is a class on Monday and Wednesday when teachers explain the materials.
There are videos by Khan Academy the students are encouraged to watch if they cannot complete the problems in the work pack
Sometimes there is an opportunity for a check-in with a teacher on Thursday
Once the work pack has been completed students need to do a practice check, which the teacher may choose to grade when submitted or whenever they have time.
Once a grade is in the system the student can take the unit test, which can be done Mon-Fri.
Once that is done the next work pack will become available.
What have we learned: If during the self-paced work on the pack one does not understand how the problem is to be solved and the Kahn Academy video or other YouTube clips still leave the student at a loss, the student can wait until the next check-in, which can be two to four days, before being able to continue with the work pack. Alternatively one can retain the services of a tutor to avoid the multi day wait. I am lucky to be able to afford hiring a tutor, though not sure I want to be doing this for 3-7 classes.
If students wanted to work ahead and for instance do the “A” class Mon/Tue and the “B” class Wed/Thur (mine does to manage her time for other work), they cannot take the test until the teacher has graded the practice. However, both teachers refuse to do so before Thursday, rather than when the task is completed by the student, for reasons I do fail to understand. As a result the check-in tests cannot be taken before Friday and the two classes (A&B) taught in parallel are tested in parallel rather than self-paced.
If I translate this to the reopening schedule it means students will have seven tests each Friday. Now that is something really to look forward too.
While I have founded a pre-school and a school I am no educator, so am very much representing the wishful consumer side of things. From the research we have been doing into possible universities there do appear to be options to not only live stream, but also make recordings available of classes in case they were missed. From my own work I know that applications such as miro or MS teams allow white boards and break out group discussions, posting of virtual sticky notes and so on.
I do not object to online content, but I guess there is also a reason why five lessons are taught per class every week, and yes these do combine lots of different materials. That is all good and it is also not the self-paced learning or the work packs I have concerns with (in fact that may actually be excellent college prep).
My main concern is really about the students ability to acquire new knowledge and being instructed , particularly for new electives such as psychology or environmental sciences, ability to get regular help when they are stuck and neither the summer program nor Q4 suggest that, otherwise I would not have gone and hired a math tutor.
So far check-in is once a week. Some teachers are reasonably responsive to emails (answer within a day or two), while others go completely incommunicado; seemingly vanishing of the face of the earth. I really do not want to beat up our mostly wonderful and very dedicated teachers, but if we move to a completely virtual world they need to be available for students to ask at least an hour per day, every day, in addition to potentially scheduling one on one (and maybe they reserve half of that one hour to do so, while the other half is an open room people can come to and asks questions when it is their turn). Presumably responding to emails means extra workload given the 150 or so students each teacher has on a given day, but if students cannot otherwise interact with teachers, I feel a response within 24 hours is reasonable to expect.
I believe this holds especially true for the seniors whose grades are critical for college applications, so they will be needing extra attention and support to ensure their education is at par.
For IB students ensuring instructional learning is even more important as they will be tested and compared to students from all over the world. My daughter is a full IBDP student. She will be assessed based on content taught over two years for the HL classes and the entire upcoming year on SL classes, some of which are completely new territory (e.g. environmental science). I would like to understand how our students will be instructed to the same academic level as a student in Canada, Germany or New Zealand.
The responses I have received from the PTA and other parents are overwhelmingly positive! I am curious to see if there will be any change to the reopening plans. If there should be a viable vaccine by the end of the year and if the USA manages to procure enough and distribute it, maybe, just maybe the students can return to class for the second semester and the Seniors will have at least part of the Senior HS experience.
As to vaccine, the moron in chief is now retweeting posts from some doctor who not only claims the vaccines in development are designed to suppress faith through the “alien DNA used, but also that a drug proven to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst can cure Corona. How about a vaccine against stupidity? This supposed doctor also is also preaching that demons join people when they masturbate, speaking of “demon semen”, while god supposedly watches over sex in wedlock. A message the moron in chief happily Retweets. Does the wedlock apply to any sex marriages or would go only watch over sex between married men and women, I wonder?
Otherwise no news on vaccine developments.
In addition to her summer job babysitting, what in my view is a spoiled five year old brat, EM is doing a summer pre-Calc class, basically completing a years worth of math in five weeks, finishing up her CAS project, the university resource website for overseas studies, participating in the dive team and most recently has also started baking for the homeless. So, she is busy!
As a result, the baking happens late at night. Yesterday, in the middle of the night the piece of shit I had the misfortune to buy from GE and that is masking as a wall oven has broken down yet again, just as EM was going to bake the cookies. This is the third time in 7 months since I bought it. Now it will just not turn on. I hope the touch panel has permanently died and they will finally need to replace this piece of junk (it imploded after 20 days, they fixed it, then the convection fan broke three months later and they fixed it). This is not unrealistic. The touch panel in my previous oven broke and the reapir would have cost twice as much as a new appliance. Most annoyingly there is no appointment to be had until Friday in a week. Never ever shall I buy a GE appliance again. The product has been malfunctioning since it was installed and the service sucks, one cannot speak to a human, the lsat repair took two months and three visits by the mechanics. I also contacted Bray & Scarf to let them know I will not ever buy anything from them again either, seeing they sold me the lemon and then abdicated from any service responsibility. The latter has yielded some results. First I was told to contact GE, then I was told to ask for a replacement to both of which I responded that it is neigh impossible to reach a human at GE and that I have asked for a new oven to replace the lemon twice and been denied both times. The sales representative asked me for the repair orders; let’s see if he can get me a new oven!
Clearly, I have been on a mission today!
With now more mask wearing and social distancing in Florida, Texas and Arizona cases seem to be plateauing, as in there is no longer a day on day increase in infections, but new cases remain in the 50-60k range every single day. The Virus is moving on into other States, with cases rising in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Indiana. Is anyone really surprised at this? Will be interesting to see how many of the midwestern States will have an experience like Texas and Florida and how this may or may not impact the election. T
otal global infections stand at 16.8million, 4.48 million of which can be attributed to the USA who now count over 152k dead.