There is a popular saying that applies to learning: “you can lead a horse to water, but can’t make him drink.” Any educator knows that you can’t force a student to learn, though that does not stop them from trying anything possible. A teacher could create the most gorgeous lesson plans, and employ all the best known tactics, and there may still be students that don’t want to learn. Yet students are not horses, nor are teachers horse-trainers. They’re both human beings with a latent desire to find and share knowledge. Some students have not accessed this desire yet, and their teachers are trying earnestly to connect with these students on an intellectual level, to release that latent desire. For a teacher, there is no experience more gratifying than helping a student search deep for understanding and watch as they finally discover it!
The Distance Before Distance-Learning
Connecting intellectually with students has always been the challenge addressed to teachers, even before social-distancing. Students face innumerable difficulties in their life that conflicts with regular attendance and consistent attention in the classroom. Many of these conflicts come from a barrage of social challenges, ranging from complex family tensions, lack of accessibility to adequate resources due to financial constraint, or just plain old emotional growing pains. Going to school each day is the most consistent life experience for many students, and teachers try their hardest to make the classroom experience as reliably consistent as possible.
Teachers who have the opportunity to work individually with students get a rare opportunity. Classroom sizes have limited the teacher’s reach to individual students, and standardization has normalized an almost industrial perspective of student pass-rates, as if failing students are merely the result of quality control. The more that students and teachers become statistics, the less that their human qualities are recognized and accessed. Needless to say, society has been widening the distance between students and teachers long before the Corona virus made it mandatory.
The Current COVID Reality
The age of COVID is an age of uncertainty, and the reopening of classrooms is the biggest uncertainty facing education. Every state faces a different reality, yet uncertainty about the future hangs over teacher’s lesson plans like a thunder cloud ready to strike. Schools could open one day, and yet close the next, and districts are struggling to find suitable interim solutions. Some districts have adopted temporary alternative grading systems, which may include draconian measures forcing students to start over a semester. Others have allowed more tolerant “do no wrong” measures, which lets students improve their grade without risk of lowering it. The problem is, these measures are not able to cut to the true challenges facing distance learning.
Teachers tell stories of students arriving late to classes, barely awake. Others scramble with household distractions from family members or others household responsibilities. There’s also an alarming number of students who attend, then merely shut off their camera, or walk away from the camera at ease. These are grim classroom conditions, but in some districts, about one-third of all students never even attend to begin with! This scenario would be much more alarming were it not for the very understandable circumstances. In the hardest-hit cities, some students know someone who has contracted Coronavirus. Students may also have a parent who is an essential worker, and who can’t help their children connect through the internet. And of course, there are still many students who don’t even have the technological accessibility to even connect in the first place.
Solutions! (Some Assembly Required)
The truth is, these situations are just a microcosm of challenges that already faced our education system. How are students able to take on hours of homework when they’re burdened with sibling-care and household responsibilities? How are students supposed to get emotional support when they have overworked parents, or worse yet, sick parents? How are students able to excel in increasingly technical work when they have limited access to technology? These societal issues are being amplified by distance learning. The most requested solution by teachers, has been and continues to be the same – reduce class size!
With smaller class sizes, teachers would have the opportunity to reach students more often, even under the stress of distance learning. Anyone who has been in a Zoom meeting during this lock-down knows that communicating effectively with a dozen or more people is nearly impossible, and it’s no different in a classroom. Teachers can prepare some of the best presentations of their life, but there’s simply no way to connect with students, on a human level, when the opportunity for interaction is so small.
Unfortunately, the reality is that our society is not ready to support the best education possible. The downturn in the economy usually leads to larger class-sizes, which means there is less opportunity for individual interaction between students and teachers. As our society stumbles into the necessity of distance learning, teachers are trying to piece together small opportunities to help encourage learning. Some are trying break-out sessions, others are trying to split classes into different sections and still some are relying on video instruction, but all teachers are faced with the reality that they will get just a few hours of facetime with their students. These attempts are admirable, and as some educators have been saying, “some education is better than no education.”
The sad truth, however, is that the public education system is not prepared to advance students academically with the current model. There are simply too many students and there is far too little time available for them to really push the limits of student learning. Students will fall behind and be forced to play “catch up” later. Governments could change the public education system drastically to accommodate the new COVID reality, but the surest way for families to re-engage in pushing academic goals is to seek the help of a professional tutor.
Tutors are accustomed to pushing students to higher achievement levels in individual settings. Tutors can help retrace past learning, focus on present difficulties, and prepare for future challenges. If the public school system is not pushing your student’s advancement, tutors can help your student move ahead and stay on pace with the academic expectations that would have existed before social distancing.
Berktree Learning, specifically, can help your family fully embrace this new reality even better. Our tutors are highly experienced with one-on-one online tutoring, helping to maintain that personal connection that is so important for education. If you are looking for alternatives to the limited public education being offered, we also have extensive experience with distant-learning and independent study programs that are tried and proven for this sort of learning environment. Our programs are adaptable to meet the specific needs of your students, to help them reach their maximum potential. Most of all, our goal is to help each student build a thirst for knowledge and learning, so that they will be able to drink deeply from the well of education in an age where this thirst is too often neglected.
We would love to help your family maintain educational stability. Let us share the joy of learning with you.
Last edited April 2o, 2020.