The F Word (Adventures in Distance Learning, part 3)

But first: Empress of Dorsa update:

Total words today: 0 (working on this post first!)
Manuscript total: 106,090

I am so happy with how Empress is going! I really hope that you will enjoy it when it’s finally finished!

And now… The F Word: Adventures in Distance Learning, part 3

At my middle school of about 830 students, our normal percentage of students who are failing at least one class is around 5 percent. In other words, maybe one or two students in any given class of about 30 might be failing.

For grading period 1, which just ended last Friday, October 9, about 60 percent of our students were failing at least one class.

Take that in for a second: from 5 percent to 60 percent. So in that same class of 30 kids, instead of one or two Fs, now there’s 18.

Why is the percentage so high?

The easiest way to answer that question is that kids are just simply not doing their work.

In my own four classes (two English classes, two English Language Development (ELD) classes), I ended up with a far lower percentage of Fs. I teach mostly sixth graders, where I had a maybe 10 percent rate of Fs, but my mixed 7th/8th grade ELD class had the highest percentage, probably closer to 30 percent Fs.

I could’ve easily had a higher percentage of Fs, closer to the school-wide percentage, except for two things: First, the English department rocks (I’ll talk about that in a second), and second, I nag my students like a Jewish mother with ADHD. (Sorry if that was too politically incorrect. I say it with great affection.)

Context first

So to add a bit of context, here’s our situation.

California state law says kids must have four hours of live instruction per day. If you have ever been at a Zoom conference, you will know that your brain begins to melt after about one hour, and now we are asking eleven to thirteen year-olds to be in a similar setting for four times that length!

So what we did as a school was this: Kids go to two core classes plus an elective per day (three hours) and have optional live tutoring sessions available to them in the morning and afternoon (four or even five hours). On Mondays, they only have one class, which is homebase (homeroom), which is about half an hour of announcements and half an hour of games and social-emotional check-ins.

On the days when they don’t have a particular class period, they are still supposed to (theoretically) do independent work for that class.

So for example, I see my period one English class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I assign them independent work to do on Wednesday and Friday.

The problem is — the reason so many kids have Fs — is that over half of them do not do the independent work.

And I’ve done everything I can think of. I tell them their assignment in class and give them time to write it down. I send them an email at the beginning of each week with an agenda of every assignment they will have. I post their assignments as an update on the class page. I send a reminder to every kid who didn’t do the assignment as soon as I notice it’s missing. I narrate numerous videos showing them exactly how to do the assignment.

AND STILL THEY DON’T DO THEIR G-D HOMEWORK.

Why the English department rocks

As a department, we English nerds noticed early on that a big percentage of kids were not going to do their independent work no matter how much we encouraged, cajoled, emailed, and called home. And we found it unacceptable for half of our kids to fail.

We also hated (okay, “hated” is a strong word… how about “really disliked”?) the online curriculum the school had chosen because it’s tedious, boring, and inevitably takes longer than what it says it will, and so we basically ignored that curriculum until we couldn’t avoid it anymore without getting in trouble. Now that we are using it, we still use it as little as we can — it supplements our teaching rather than replaces it.

Why we hate it: When the program estimates that it will take a student 25 minutes to go through a given online lesson, it means “25 minutes in the most ideal of all circumstances.” It doesn’t mean “25 minutes” for kids like M, who at eleven is the oldest of her siblings and is responsible not only for her own learning but for talking care of the little ones all day, and it doesn’t mean “25 minutes” for kids like K, whose dad, rather than leave him at home alone all day, takes him with from job site to job site, so that K’s work and his internet connection are being constantly interrupted.

So four or five weeks into the school year, when the English department saw our gradebooks filling up with an alarming number of zeroes for missing assignments, we jumped aboard what we like to call the “Slow it way down bus.”

That’s why I only had about six Fs across two English classes instead of 20.

Tough love vs. participation trophies

But still.

There is a common criticism of parents / parenting these days that kids are coddled, especially compared to some golden era when “I had to WALK to school, and it was uphill, both ways, snowing every day, and oh by the way, I didn’t HAVE shoes, I just bundled my feet in rags!!!”

The “we coddle our children too much these days” people might have a point, though. I have certainly heard kids talk to their parents in ways that would have earned me a “pop upside the head” without consequence, and we have also made a cultural shift away from having stark winners and losers in school, sports, and other activities to everyone getting a metaphorical trophy for at least “trying their best.”

To be honest, I can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, those winners and losers in schools of the past were very strongly tied to their parents’ education level, race, and socioeconomic status. Let’s face it: Winners and losers in school still are tied to those things. But at least the education system recognized this problem and has been gradually working towards greater equity for students.

On the other hand…

Well, on the other hand, kids also need to learn to do their g-d work. And they need to face consequences if they don’t.

I chaired a parent-teacher conference for one of my students yesterday. Every one of his teachers showed up, and we all shared similar concerns with Mom — D doesn’t always attend live class sessions; when he does come he’s very tardy; he doesn’t often participate; he never turns on his camera (optional, actually); and nine times out of ten, he doesn’t turn in his homework or he turns it in days (or weeks) late.

The teachers also said they’d noticed D was getting better in the past few days — a result, Mom says, of she and her fiancé riding his butt.

“But he did miss math today,” put in Ms. H.

“Really? He missed math today?” Mom asked, confused. “He was home all day. I can’t see why he would have missed.”

“Yes,” Ms. H confirmed. “I’m one-hundred percent sure he wasn’t there.”

Mom’s eyes flashed off-screen. D was getting the death stare for sure.

“Really.” This time it was a statement, not a question.

“Yep,” Ms. H said cheerily, clearly happy with the death stare. “Really.”

“Well. I guess he lied to me, then,” said Mom, eyes still off-screen.

She then explained to us that D has always been a solid student academically. The problem with distance learning is, if she takes his eyes off of him for even a second, he starts playing Plants vs. Zombies instead of attending school or doing his schoolwork.

D is not a kid who needs a reduction in his workload. His mom is home all day long, and now that she’s caught on to the fact that he’s skipping classes and ignoring assignments, she is going to be on top of him.

“He’s really suffering with this distance learning stuff,” Mom told me in a separate phone call before the meeting. “He’s at home, he’s comfortable, he thinks it’s play time instead of school time.”

Yes, there are a lot of kids like D.

But remember how I told you about K earlier? The one whose dad has to take him around to different job sites all day? K is trying. He’s doing his best to connect to classes from his hotspot, but sometimes that might be in Dad’s truck, sometimes in a parking lot, sometimes in someone else’s garage.

On top of that, K’s dad has to go to immigration court soon. There’s a chance he’ll be deported. (A good chance, given the current climate towards immigrants.) K confided in me how stressed he is about this.

The school provided him with a counselor and a hotspot, and believe me, I’m trying to give K all the chances I can. At the same time… how am I supposed to assess K if he never turns in a single assignment and only rarely comes to class?

Yes, there are a lot of kids like D, but there are also a lot of kids like K. The specific details vary from case to case, but it comes down to the same thing: They are trying, but circumstances are conspiring against them from all sides.

Distance learning asks kids to be independent learners when, for whatever reason, they aren’t ready to be. Now, some kids ARE ready to learn this way. Some of my kids THRIVE. Sixty percent of kids not turning in assignments means that 40 percent are. Those 40 percent are going to do well, though, no matter what learning environment you throw them into. Those kids are intrinsically motivated, and they will figure it out. The other kids… at age 11, 12, 13… they haven’t figured out how to be intrinsically motivated (like D), or like K, they aren’t in a situation where it’s easy to be successful.

In conclusion, it’s hard.

I really want to see what my kids will say about distance learning twenty years from now, when they’ve had a chance to grow up and become productive adults and look back on the disastrous 2020/21 school year. I’d love to know how they explain, as adults, the ways they tried to game the system when they were eleven or twelve, or, for my straight-A students, whether they actually enjoyed the home learning environment more than the regular school environment. There’s not a lot of getting bullied at lunch or recess, after all.

In the meantime, we all — students, their parents, and teachers — are just going to keep doing the best we can with what we have. The English department will continue to cruise ahead while riding the tie-dyed Slow It Way Down Bus, D will play Plants vs. Zombies until his mom figures out a way to put a definitive end to it, and K will keep trying his best to attend class from inside his dad’s work truck.

As a school, we’re going to keep trying to make changes to keep kids from falling through the cracks and lower that percentage of Fs back down to something approaching normal. If we could get it down to 30 percent by the end of the first semester, that would suck, but at least it wouldn’t suck quite as hard as it does now.

Ultimately, we all need to just gird our loins and realize there will be no “getting back to normal” this year or probably even next year.

And as November 3rd approaches, can we please all just remember that it didn’t have to be this way? There are countries that beat back the pandemic at least enough that the schools could reopen.

But not our country.