What did you learn in school today?

What did you learn in school today?

The word is that it is an ill-wind that doesn’t blow some good.   That is true about this pandemic and its required shelter-in-place orders by various governors.   Maryland schools have been closed now since March 16 and will definitely be closed through May 15 and possibly longer.   Students are being taught online with something euphemistically called distance learning.  Not sure how much academic learning is going on but there is certainly a lot of other kinds of learning.

Teaching  special education is one of the most wonderful and fulfilling professions.  Truly, there is nothing to compare to the challenges and feelings of achievement when a kid “gets it”.  And like everything else, there are downsides.   One of the issues that sometimes arises is the difference in aspirations between parents and teachers.   Parents have great dreams for their children.  They do not want to let those dreams go.  Who could blame them?   

Teachers have dreams too.   They want to take the kids as far as the child’s ability will allow.  Not every child, with or without disabilities, has the interest or talent to attend college.  That is not a bad thing in spite of the current culture that everyone needs to go to college.  Sometimes there is conflict between what teachers see the best career path for a child and what parents’ aspirations are.  

Parents will sometimes insist that their children should be doing grade level work or should be doing more advanced math.  Teachers see kids struggling to make change, write a five sentence paragraph or understand inferred meaning in something that was read.

During this period of online learning, that is seeming to last forever, parents have been recruited, willingly or not, to act as assistant teachers.  They have participated in their child’s struggle to learn.   They have seen how difficult it is for some kids to continue to attend.  And they have also learned a lot about technology from their children who were born to this stuff.  As a result of this new immersion into their children’s learning much has been learned by the parents.  

Each day we are one day closer to our children being schooled in school.   When we are all together again, teachers and students inside a school building, there will be a new appreciation of what teachers do and how students learn.  When we ask the question, “What did you learn in school today?”, it may be the parents who are the ones answering.