In K12 news, more than 40k students never logged in to the first week of online classes in the Houston school district. School officials are hopeful that at least some children may return to school once it resumes in person in October. I expect similar statistics at other large districts.
My brother told me last night that his son (just started HS in TX) had teachers who never sent out any of the zoom password so they couldn’t log in. Wonder if that was part of the problem in Houston @roycroftmom?
Do you know if there are there plans to engage these students if school does not end up resuming in person?
I agree with you, there are likely to be similar numbers across many large urban areas. The numbers in rural areas may not be so great either.
Our society’s responsibility to educate children has evidently evaporated.
No doubt technical glitches were responsible for at least some absentees, but I am not confident those will be eliminated. The Houston district did try in the Spring to track down the thousands of kids who essentially dropped out in March, but was unsuccessful in reaching 90% of them, according to news reports.
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) just started this past Tuesday, fully remote. We will see what type of engagement numbers they get over the next couple of weeks.
It’s tough to make direct comparisons within the same state because LACs tend to be distributed very unevenly along the eastern states and not many other places. Still, there are Oberlin vs Ohio State and Davidson vs UNC. You also have the example of Duke, not a LAC, but a private university with an elaborate residential system. The correlation seems to be that colleges with more control over where their students live seem to be having the best results so far.
This is why we sent our S back to campus even though classes have been all online. Last spring was not good for him. It was way too isolating. He’s still not happy with online classes but at least he has the companionship of his roommates and close friends. Then, by pure luck, it turns out that he actually shares a class with one of his roommates - the class is in S’s major and his roommate signed up for it as a gen ed. They didn’t even realize it until classes started. His school is still planning to go to f2f next week but I am doubtful that will really happen, but it is still so much better for him to be there in the college environment.
I am glad Houston city schools will reopen in October, so there is at least some chance some of those absent children can be saved.
The point of summerizing is so people don’t have to sign up. My malware is also saying not to.
This comes out sounding like the professor was intentionally horrid, when it could have been problems or confusion with using the technology and trying to address those in front of her at the same time.
Last week, I had to patch a quarantined student in to lab on Zoom with my laptop and my cellphone. We had a feedback loop that made it difficult for him to hear anything, but I didn’t know how to fix in the few minutes I had before class. Afterwards we figured out together that I have to keep the iphone audio off entirely so that only the laptop participates. No doubt somewhere out there his mother is ranting about how I “didn’t even get an audio her sick son could hear, fgs, the incompetent boob”.
In other bright news, students are wearing their masks, but some of them are not wearing them properly or are pulling them down periodically. Our school has just announced that if a student tests positive and had been in any class longer than 60 minutes, the entire class and professor would be quarantined for 2 weeks. I have a 135 minute class twice a week, so have to hope none of us get sick.
Totally agree! I for one am freaking tired of the “they aren’t really adults yet, can’t be expected…” argument. It just excuses bad behavior. Doing dumb things when young, is not the same as flouting safety rules that protect others. And no amount of making excuses makes that true. It just gives support to jerks being jerks.
The kind of folk who’d go out when positive, or hide tests, or not get them, etc. are the types of people who will and do also do that as “actual adults.”
And the excusing of threatening behavior just adds to that cultural ethos. We have too much of it as it is. Even when it’s dressed up as “explaining, not excusing.” It’s NOT an explanation. Plenty of young adults know how not to be jerks. It’s just cover for those who don’t care.
totally agree with @NJSue . Hyflex sounds like the worst of all possible worlds. My students are having a better experience than @taverngirl 's D, I believe. We are all on Zoom once a week, async once a week. It’s not my ideal, but my focus is always on them, not the students in the room.
Seems safe to open a free account at the Chronicle. Anyway here are some snippets from the article:
The rest of the article covers the gray area of what profs can and can not say in a public forum (social media), whether what the prof said is in violation of the Faculty Manual (Juniata admin says yes, prof says no), and also that the parties are trying to work things out.
I also love the “oh well, they are adults and can make their own decisions! What can you do?” sometimes from the same person! (Not talking about this board btw.)
I liked this OpEd in the Cornell student newspaper that seems to be making the rounds. That’s what a young ADULT sounds like IMO:
Agreed. Young adults in residential colleges in China, for example, manage to follow the rules just fine. Making excuses for college students’ poor behavior just exacerbates the problem. The issue isn’t really maturity, it is character.
Great article, @PetraMC !
I did not mean to make it sound like it was intentional. D does not think that is the case. The professor is old and very low tech (does not even have a cell phone). D is not hopeful (knowing this professor-she’s had him for several classes) that he has he desire to really learn how he needs to operate in order to provide a high quality online experience. He’s probably doing the best he can but it’s likely not going to be good enough for her.
And apparently, just because you are not on campus does not mean they won’t feed you free food at some of their seminars! 
My son has begun transporting Covid positive students to the emergency room. He says they’ve all had strong oxygen levels. He believes they were having panic attacks rather than Covid related complications.
Some of the problem is that these kids have parents. Learnt behavior starts somewhere… Yes, I understand that with the best parental training we all can breed jerks… But hopefully not.