Don’t get me wrong, I understand why we are not in person schooling yet. The safety of our students, their families, and our staff is far too important to risk, and I am extremely glad to have a governor who took a strong stance in the face of neglectful politicians. But to say that our students will be fine with a year off from education in their developmental years an absurd platitude meant to make us feel good.
One of my favorite pictures of teaching in action. “Hey Google” “What are the best practices for teaching during Covid-19?” Spoiler alert: There are none. When my school district produced a mandatory professional development session that taught teachers how to transition to online learning, I became immediately skeptical. I was also frustrated at the utter hubris it takes to claim to know anything about online learning when your background is everything but, and then present it as a mandatory training module. While I did learn some things about Canvas that I was completely unaware of (which I am deeply grateful for), there was a lot of unnecessary stress added by the way the PD was rolled out. I want to make it very clear, I’m not frustrated with our district coaches. I’m frustrated with the administration that made the decisions and how it was rolled out in typical half-ass fashion, i.e., not having their poop in a group. Every year teachers are bombarded with crap. And I do mean crap. Between education corporations looking to sell you the latest …
Recently, I accepted an online position for some extra time and money through VIP Kid. I fully intend to share updates with ups and downs. So this post will be a kind of baseline for how I am feeling, what I am seeing, and so forth. The first thing I would like to share is that teaching EFL (English as foreign language) is a completely different ball game compared to ESL. I am very glad that I noticed this difference now. My classroom students are expected to learn English as they live their everyday lives in school. They have to function in English. They also are acquiring English. Online, the majority of these students are not living in environments where English is spoken even a portion of the time. This means that you have to be extremely careful and selective in the language that you use in the session. At first, I thought that was going to be easy, but try as an experiment limiting your language to a handful of words and phrases, then …
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