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Jan. 4th, 2021 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evening_tsarSo this is the future!
I got to overhear an online Grade 1 lesson today. It was complete bedlam.
Anyone with any experience of it will tell you that herding groups of 5-6 year olds is only slightly easier than herding cats, and herding them FROM ANOTHER ROOM a downright laughable proposition.
And yet that is precisely what online learning for this age group amounts to.
So there was a lot of "Can you mute yourself? Can you unmute yourself? Can you press that button on the bottom of your screen? The big green one. That's right!
"Oh, and what's your name? Are you in my class now? How old are you?"
Utter chaos.
I did not blame the teacher. In fact, I wanted to buy the poor man a drink. I've been in that position, trying to maintain some semblance of order while being completely at the mercy of finicky technologies and finickier audiences. It's a maddening position to be in, bad enough when your pupils can actually read - I can only imagine when they can't (I turn down this age group for online). If the fellow kept a bottle of vodka under his desk, I wouldn't be surprised or blame him at all.
No one is happy about it - everyone knows it's a crisis-driven improvisation. Teachers and parents are making the best of a bad situation, and more power to them. No one is suggesting this should go on one minute longer than it has to. When this is all done, I hope no one in polite company every again suggests this is the way of the future.
Right up until the pandemic began, this is exactly what technocrats and futurists were arguing. They were pushing it in newspaper columns, personal blogs, and education journals. They had the ears of politicians and pedagogues, and under their guidance, schools were mechanizing.
I'd been doing online lessons on a freelance basis for quite a while by then, and had been warning everyone within ear-shot about its short-comings. But no one would listen because I was just a luddite with a flip-phone.
Now I was hearing other professionals enduring the same thing I'd endured years before-hand, undergoing all the same frustrations. I couldn't help thinking to the whole world "told you so."
Doubtless, the technocrats would argue this was not what they had in mind - a more gradual transition
complete with professional training and resource development. Yeah sure. All I know is that if any such wonk showed up in that first grade class and suggested to that teacher that the current arrangement should be made permanent, they would be beaten to death with a web-cam.
Pass the chalk.
I got to overhear an online Grade 1 lesson today. It was complete bedlam.
Anyone with any experience of it will tell you that herding groups of 5-6 year olds is only slightly easier than herding cats, and herding them FROM ANOTHER ROOM a downright laughable proposition.
And yet that is precisely what online learning for this age group amounts to.
So there was a lot of "Can you mute yourself? Can you unmute yourself? Can you press that button on the bottom of your screen? The big green one. That's right!
"Oh, and what's your name? Are you in my class now? How old are you?"
Utter chaos.
I did not blame the teacher. In fact, I wanted to buy the poor man a drink. I've been in that position, trying to maintain some semblance of order while being completely at the mercy of finicky technologies and finickier audiences. It's a maddening position to be in, bad enough when your pupils can actually read - I can only imagine when they can't (I turn down this age group for online). If the fellow kept a bottle of vodka under his desk, I wouldn't be surprised or blame him at all.
No one is happy about it - everyone knows it's a crisis-driven improvisation. Teachers and parents are making the best of a bad situation, and more power to them. No one is suggesting this should go on one minute longer than it has to. When this is all done, I hope no one in polite company every again suggests this is the way of the future.
Right up until the pandemic began, this is exactly what technocrats and futurists were arguing. They were pushing it in newspaper columns, personal blogs, and education journals. They had the ears of politicians and pedagogues, and under their guidance, schools were mechanizing.
I'd been doing online lessons on a freelance basis for quite a while by then, and had been warning everyone within ear-shot about its short-comings. But no one would listen because I was just a luddite with a flip-phone.
Now I was hearing other professionals enduring the same thing I'd endured years before-hand, undergoing all the same frustrations. I couldn't help thinking to the whole world "told you so."
Doubtless, the technocrats would argue this was not what they had in mind - a more gradual transition
complete with professional training and resource development. Yeah sure. All I know is that if any such wonk showed up in that first grade class and suggested to that teacher that the current arrangement should be made permanent, they would be beaten to death with a web-cam.
Pass the chalk.
