Teacher unions are losing time fighting live-video learning
Imagine if some doctors refused to conduct virtual (but essential) medical consultations online — or if OHIP refused to pay for it — unless every patient in the province had a computer with broadband access.
If not everyone, no one. No matter how many missed medical treatments.
We would accuse those truant doctors of malpractice in an emergency. And we would condemn those OHIP bureaucrats for malfeasance, heartlessness and pigheadedness in a pandemic.
Yet that’s the argument from some teachers, and their unions, for logging off when they are needed most. At a time of social distancing, they are distancing themselves from remote learning in real time.
This week, as the government prodded laggards and luddites to embrace video-conferencing, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario pushed back. Declaring itself “fundamentally opposed to it being mandated as a learning tool during this pandemic,” ETFO claimed the moral high ground on face-to-face interactions while putting its head in the sand.
This is old-time sophistry when there is no time to lose, for a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And a school year is an awful thing to throw away.
Amid the union defiance and obfuscations, let’s be clear on one point: Most teachers get it and are actively embracing interactive learning.
They chose the teaching profession because they like being connected — and they understand connectivity. They want to see their students in real time — whether lecturing in the front of the classroom or leading from a distance online.
Yes, we are in uncharted territory. Online isn’t always optimal, but can’t be optional forever.
Pre-pandemic, when the
Progressive Conservative government proposed four mandatory online high school courses a year ago, I wrote that it was unprecedented and uncalled for, with no good reason to rush. No one in North America had made such a move last year, but today everyone is on the move online.
Because it’s 2020, the year of COVID-19.
In a pandemic, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Students can’t stand still or sit at home doing nothing while teachers find their comfort zones.
In the early days of the COVID-19 closure, many public school trustees, teachers and educators insisted on a pause until more iPads and Chromebooks could be distributed to students still offline. A level playing field is fair enough — but not if it means cancelling the season because of a bog.
Equality of access is a fundamental tenet of our public schools — just as leaving no man behind is a credo of soldiers in combat, and “No child left behind” was once the watchword of U.S. Republicans. Both emanate from the Latin phrase nemo resideo, or “leave no one behind.”
If our publicly funded schools don’t catch up fast, the entire system — and all its students — will be left behind. They have already been left in the academic dust by many private schools, whose teachers and administrators have seen the future and embraced digital learning without missing a beat.
Yes, it’s unfair to compare private-school privilege with public-school demographics. Yet faith-based schools, which aren’t overflowing with affluence but have an abundance of spirit, seem more ready to make a leap of faith online — for nowhere is it written that academics must be analog.
Educators already adapt to teaching students with different learning trajectories in the classroom and across the system. In reality, we leave people behind all the time, but we figure out ways to help them catch up and even things out over time.
Holding all students back until every student and teacher is in alignment is a recipe for stasis. Equality of opportunity makes sense at the starting line in September when classes begin anew, but, with students stuck at home and the June home-stretch looming, don’t put their studies on hold while teachers take their time catching up.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce, whose ministry heralded online learning last year, was slow to roll it out in midpandemic.
But he is making up for lost time by urging teachers to embrace real-time learning, noting that “countless” parents have complained that “students were lacking in face-toface interactions with their classmates and educators.”
A Toronto District School Board committee this month also called for more “interactive” learning. But ETFO doesn’t seem all that interested in interactive.
Trapped in an hourglass, the union is drawing its own line in the sand: “Children without access to tools to make livestream learning work are disproportionately from racialized, impoverished, single family or new Canadian homes. Not all students can be online at the same time nor do they all have access to the internet or a device.”
ETFO’s York local, so often inclined toward its own Trotskyite take on the ideology of pedagogy, argued that teachers risked “potential allegations of misconduct” if students or hackers disrupted lessons. Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation president Harvey Bischof warned of the “risk to staff and students” from live learning, adding that “not everyone is able to have a suitable and safe space.”
But waiting for every kink to be ironed out, and every worstcase scenario to be ruled out, is a prescription for paralysis in a pandemic — when necessity is the mother of inventions. And the father of connections.
Students don’t need real-time connectivity at all times. But, as most teachers understand from their classroom experience, face-to-face interactions — even at a distance — can be the best way to stay connected in the worst of times.