Living in an online environment

Remember during the pandemic when we taught and learned online? Shudder. There were a few positives from it, things that opened up possibilities in many businesses. But overall, we can look back and recognize that learning that way is not optimal.

Many businesses, including state workers, are now required to come into the office and be present to work at least part of each week. That is also optimal. The reality of working at home and not being constantly tempted to go watch something or get a snack or mow the lawn can be overpowering.

Don’t get me wrong. I use Zoom and Google Meet for various things. For example, I visited with some teachers in another district about health insurance and the path we have taken here to try and lower the outrageous costs. That works really well to visit with people in distant locations. At times, coming out of the pandemic, a student who was home ill would still join in a Google Meet if they felt up to it and didn’t want to miss that day’s lesson.

However, the whole online learning thing may have gotten out of hand. Many students, in both high school and college, take online classes that are asynchronous, meaning they have material on there they can complete within a certain timeframe, but there is no direct teaching done. An instructor is available to answer questions if needed.

In some ways, I like to run my classroom in a similar way. I don’t stand in front doing direct teaching for very long most days. But I do teach the material to the students. They sit in my classroom and learn. Much of that time is spent doing the work with me there to assist. BUT THEY ARE IN MY CLASSROOM.

Anton took a geology class with a lab last year at MSU. That sounds cool, right?

It was an online, asynchronous class.

What? How is a lab class done online? Shouldn’t there be hands-on learning and looking at actual rocks, not just pictures of them?

Oh, but it gets better. 

This year, he had a public speaking class.

All online. All asynchronous. 

I’m offended as a teacher. There’s no public in public speaking without people.

And this is where we seem to be heading in education. I look at our senior class at NRHEG this year. These kids were in 7th grade when the pandemic hit, so they bore the brunt of learning, along with me, how to navigate an online school process.

And then they helped take it to a new level. We have an inordinate amount of students doing online schooling of some kind or other. So many enjoyed sitting at home and doing things at their own pace that they have chosen to do as much of that as possible. 

This is not real life anymore. But there continues to be that push to have as many people stay home to work as possible. I thought we didn’t like lockdowns? Yes, I know there is a difference, and I understand being introverted lends itself to working on your own. But interacting with people is and should be a reality in our world.

A concern is that students are working with flexible deadlines. My bills don’t have those, but if you become so accustomed to flexibility, you have a more difficult time dealing with the realities of adulthood and everyday life.

That’s my concern for the class of 2025. There are so many that have chosen to float a bit that when they have to come back to earth, it could be a jarring experience. 

I also worry about so many of the online classes and their rigor. I’ve had numerous students over the past few years pop in for assistance on some of their online work. Part of the problem I’ve witnessed is the lack of direct access, right now, to those instructors. The other part is some of the work does not seem like college level. I’ve seen assignments that look like something I would assign to freshmen…in high school.

If we’re going to offer all these options to students, then there has to be more oversight into what they are doing. For Anton’s online public speaking class, some of the material was recordings of lessons taught during the pandemic. So the professor is basically mailing it in and collecting a paycheck. I reuse materials all the time (especially bad jokes), but there are often tweaks and adjustments made based on the group sitting in my classroom. Again, the difference is people sitting in my classroom.

If our students don’t get used to being around others and having the capability to interact, we might as well just let AI take over now. If they have an easy cloud to float on without having to put much effort into a college class, good luck on innovation and ingenuity in the future.

We will probably offer some form of online schooling here at NRHEG soon. We have to, in order to keep up and keep kids with us. I hope we can find classes that are worth the effort and that give our students intense educational opportunities. 

And I hope our graduating seniors have not been so irrevocably harmed by this shift in education that they flounder when they face real life. Every year, I wish the seniors good luck. I do so again, but there is a very different tenor in my voice with this year’s best wishes.

Word of the Week: This week’s word is gormless, which means dull or stupid, as in, “While the student found some of his classes to be gormless, he recognized the importance of being in front of the teacher to learn.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!