A thread: Dear virtual teachers, I am also a virtual teacher, teaching Gr12 from home while also supporting my child in his Gr2 distance learning class. I have some things to share, from the perspective of an overwhelmed parent. 1/14

We believe in public education and do not want to join the Minister of Education in undermining our public education system. But honestly, and I hear this from a lot of parents, we could easily homeschool our kid for 2 hrs each day and actually be able to do our own jobs. 2/14
So you need to make it as easy as possible for us to hang in there. Or we won’t. And parents will pull their kids from school and your system will be devastated. Here are some requests based on our current experience. 3/14
1. Connection is more important than curriculum right now. Please do whatever you can to provide our kids with connection to other kids. If they don’t get to interact with others, they’d might as well just do homeschooling. Connection is the #1 thing you have to offer us. 4/14
2. Please smile. Be kind. Let go a little bit. If kids ask for show and tell, leader of the day, theme days etc, please go along with it. They are desperate for these fun things. We aren’t seeing them in our class, even when kids ask. 5/14
3. Please post links to all the meetings and activities in one place. Brightspace is killing us. Don’t make Nana hunt for everything. Keep it simple and make it easily accessible for everyone and you won't spend all class helping parents find things. 6/14
4. Please post an agenda with times for each activity so parents can ensure their kids are where they need to be. If we need to sit right beside our kids all day, it becomes very clear that we could just do this on our own, and in less time. 7/14
5. Please realize that Zoom fatigue is real and all the meetings are hard on our kids. Mine is crying about stress for the first time in his life. 8/14
6. Synchronous doesn’t have to mean more of you talking at them while they stare at the screen. A kid who finished their work in 5 mins shouldn’t have to spend the next 25 mins watching their classmates do their work. 9/14
If the Ministry mandates 225 mins of synchronous learning, insisting that your students sit in meetings for 260 mins each day is just way too much. More is not better. In fact, more is absolutely worse. 10/14
7. Please give these kids a chance to get up and move. They need a break between activities and would get it at regular school. Our kid’s free time for food and recess is currently half of what he would get in regular school. 11/14
8. Please stop trying to make virtual school like your regular class and instead embrace the opportunity to build something entirely new. There is so much potential for great stuff in this realm. 12/14
9. Please get that if you can’t create a program that works better than what we could do at home, parents will pull their kids out. Adjust your standards a bit, focus on connection and make it engaging for kids and easier for parents. 13/14
10. I hear about lots of good things going on in virtual classrooms. It is totally possible to make it engaging and meaningful and doable. And I know it is hard, hard work. Thank you to those of you who are creating classes where kids thrive and not just survive. 14/14
Thank you to @OECTAProv and @ETFOeducators for listening to a beleaguered parent.

More from Education

When the university starts sending out teaching evaluation reminders, I tell all my classes about bias in teaching evals, with links to the evidence. Here's a version of the email I send, in case anyone else wants to poach from it.

1/16


When I say "anyone": needless to say, the people who are benefitting from the bias (like me) are the ones who should helping to correct it. Men in math, this is your job! Of course, it should also be dealt with at the institutional level, not just ad hoc.
OK, on to my email:
2/16

"You may have received automated reminders about course evals this fall. I encourage you to fill the evals out. I'd be particularly grateful for written feedback about what worked for you in the class, what was difficult, & how you ultimately spent your time for this class.

3/16

However, I don't feel comfortable just sending you an email saying: "please take the time to evaluate me". I do think student evaluations of teachers can be valuable: I have made changes to my teaching style as a direct result of comments from student teaching evaluations.
4/16

But teaching evaluations have a weakness: they are not an unbiased estimator of teaching quality. There is strong evidence that teaching evals tend to favour men over women, and that teaching evals tend to favour white instructors over non-white instructors.
5/16
The outrage is not that she fit better. The outrage is that she stated very firmly on national television with no caveat, that there are no conditions not improved by exercise. Many people with viral sequelae have been saying for years that exercise has made them more disabled 1/


And the new draft NICE guidelines for ME/CFS which often has a viral onset specifically say that ME/CFS patients shouldn't do graded exercise. Clare is fully aware of this but still made a sweeping and very firm statement that all conditions are improved by exercise. This 2/

was an active dismissal of the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of patients with viral sequelae. Yes, exercise does help so many conditions. Yes, a very small number of people with an ME/CFS diagnosis are helped by exercise. But the vast majority of people with ME, a 3/

a quintessential post-viral condition, are made worse by exercise. Many have been left wheelchair dependent of bedbound by graded exercise therapy when they could walk before. To dismiss the lived experience of these patients with such a sweeping statement is unethical and 4/

unsafe. Clare has every right to her lived experience. But she can't, and you can't justifiably speak out on favour of listening to lived experience but cherry pick the lived experiences you are going to listen to. Why are the lived experiences of most people with ME dismissed?

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