SCHOOL

July 28, 2020

My son is a high school math teacher and it's about three weeks until classes would normally begin. Earlier he was told that all the students would be back in class and he would be teaching as usual in front of a room-full of kids. Now he's suspecting that he'll be teaching on-line. Or maybe party in the classroom and partly on-line for those students whose parents don't want to take the risk of sending their children to school. 

The whole question of when or if to open schools is a big mess. The Republicans want school to open to stimulate the economy. But neither they nor the Secretary of Education have any idea how difficult it would be to monitor a room-full of kids and keep them from infecting each other or the teacher. Epidemiologists agree that kids are less likely to be infected with Covid-19 although it's not clear if they have asymptomatic cases that can infect other people --- like the teacher or adults at home. 

I've heard all kinds of schemes. A young friend who will be a freshman at UCLA said she'll be on campus, in a dorm room but without a roommate, and will be taking all on-line courses. My grandsons, all college students, seem to be taking mostly on-line classes, but labs need to be in-person, apparently with small groups, masked and sociallly distanced. 

Stanford has a crazy scheme to divide the academic year into four parts with freshmen and seniors attending in person for parts 1 and 4, and sophomores and juniors attending parts 2 and 3 in person. During the non-resident periods, classes will be on-line. Special arrangements will be made for transfer students and foreign students. My husband feels they may change at the last minute to all-online with most students at home intead of on campus. I wonder if students coming from far away already have airplane reservations. 

One family I know has five children from elementary school age to high school seniors. They're expecting that all the kids will be taking classes on-line. They live in a three-bedroom house but will need to supply five computers for five students, and find five different places --- separate from each other --- for each student to work. 

Here in California, Governor Newsome has mandated that schools cannot open in any of the counties that are on his watch-list. Because California counties vary widely in density of population, and numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases, he's drawn a line between those counties with low incidences of Covid-19 and that can probably open schools safely and those where the instance of Covid-19 is high and are on his watch-list. 

Teachers must be going crazy, not knowing how to prepare. Some teaching techniques will work better in person and other techniques are more suited to the computer screen. In addition the teachers are concerned that they themselves may be at risk and could take Covid-19 home to other family members. 

There's going to be a lot of confusion in the next few months.