So, I was a little sick. Sorry I missed you. But I came back to share that despite President #45 declaring victory over Covid, it ain’t going nowhere no time soon. No vaccine or cure is coming to save any of us in the near future.
With that being said, what do the regular folks living on planet earth do in the meantime about our lives? I think, while I was ill, this was the singular most daunting question that I pondered the most.
While I did not have Covid, I nearly lost my mind trying to find my daughter a local testing site for her age , because apparently toddlers do not have droplets or are perceived non-transmitters I guess with almost no testing sites urgghh. A question captured my mind.
What do we do in the meantime?
As an educator, thankfully, local Atlanta schools decided to keep schools closed due to recent spikes and fear of further community spread. But closing doors does not mean we have answered the true challenges our kids and their families are facing in this moment.
No amount of Zoom video chats will fix what is broken in our educational system during remote learning and that is the anachronistic industrial design of American learning systems.
At the start of compulsory public schools in the 1920s, they were built to prepare kids for industrial and standardized jobs that did repetitive and simple tasks ( and to keep kids from competing in the labor market), not to grow and nurture individuals.
So in this season, whole classes are not aggregated together as the sum parts of basic and average kids depending on each other to learn or not.
Kids are by and large, individually learning at home and have never experienced this level of independence to finally explore themselves as an individual and discover what works best for them.
What’s more parents have mostly never had the luxury of this individual learning experience for themselves so they definitely have no reference point to help their own children through this new modality of learning as well. Even this week, as I tried to help one of my students figure out what supports she needed to improve in class, she said, “Those Youtube Videos are too long for me to watch and teach myself. I just want to know where the answer is so I can be done with it.”.
This mindset is pervasive with most kids that just want an answer so they can just be done and fit in with everyone else.
But what if kids understood their individual passions, strengths and weaknesses and didn’t just want to go with the crowd?
What kind of world would that be? See more of the article here.
Monique Nunnally has been in education since 2015. Her greatest joy is working with kids. She believes in the Teach for America’s mantra, ” One Day all children will have access to a quality education”.
Jason has worked in education for over 15 years as a teacher, blogger and community advocate. He speaks and writes primarily about the need to improve education for Black boys, particularly increasing the number of Black male educators in schools. In addition to blogging here at EdLanta, Jason is also a featured writer at Education Post.
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