They used to call it correspondence schooling. Then it became distance education. Now it’s social distance education?

Remote teaching and learning are helping to fill the massive hole in school and college work. Really good courses need time, money, professional designers, trained practitioners. (Even then such courses don’t work for everything or everybody.) Here and now we’ve got makeshifts. They’re much better than nothing.

Unfortunately, as both the New York Times and the Portland Sunday Telegraph have pointed out, remote learning is too far away for too many. Students without appropriate equipment and good internet access miss out. A friend tells me that his elementary school-aged daughter hasn’t seen several classmates for weeks: they’re not there in Zoomed classes.

This aspect of pandemic needs short and longer term responses from our schools.

Short term:

Those more-or-less offline will have missed a lot of information, a lot of facts. That’s regrettable; teachers will have to keep it in mind next year. More important: offline students’ basic skills – reading, writing, calculating, thinking, interacting – will be rusty. That needs prompt attention. If the crisis has abated by July, a Summer Skills School could do a lot. Reading some books, writing some essays, doing some math; all with others.)

Longer term:

Have we committed our schools to the computer at the expense of too many students? When we talk about good and bad websites, have we forgotten that some students lack easy access to both Wikipedia and supposedly more reliable online sources? Our school libraries are still there: are we telling our students, often enough, that the books are still full of good stuff? Are textbooks that go home with the student, that lay out a term’s or a year’s work at a glance, really obsolete? “Read the next chapter and do the exercises”: it’s not, by itself, the best way to learn, but it covers the ground, however the student may be situated. Pens, pencils, and paper are still useful means of recording and communicating knowledge and ideas. Are we sure that students are comfortable with them, just in case?

If the next pandemic is an internet virus, are teachers and students prepared?

Fortunately, all of David R Jones’s U of Maine Augusta students are online.