Adult bullies have no business monitoring Zoom classrooms
What did you struggle with in school?
For me, it was reading, as I could decode perfectly, but the words came so slowly it was difficult to make sense of what I’d just read.
I dreaded the days when we would read out loud by turns. The teacher would proceed up and down the rows, asking each student to read one paragraph before moving onto the next. I’d quickly count how many seats were before mine and then practice reading my section silently so as not to be embarrassed.
I know my experience wasn’t unique. Some kids dreaded being called upon to recite multiplication tables. Some struggled to differentiate between adjectives and adverbs. Others started feeling queasy every time “x” showed up in an equation. Would the class giggle if we stumbled?
Fortunately, we weren’t learning remotely via Zoom, because for all the COVID-19 safety that comes with online learning, it also comes with adult voyeurism — parents viewing classroom instruction over Johnny’s shoulder so as to measure how he stacks up against the others.
Those parents keeping notes — how many times another child needs redirection, attempting to offer data showing Suzie is distracting from their Johnny’s learning —are now the voyeurs du jour. Other parents are watching, sitting in judgement,
just waiting for teachers to make an error so they can quickly call it into school administration. Those providing “video evidence” that their child should have been placed into the teacher’s class they lobbied for all summer are the new school bullies.
As a former superintendent of schools, I thought I’d seen it all until I witnessed an exchange between parents — in a grocery store. Acouple was showing a video of their child’s Zoom classroom with another couple, while laughing and poking fun at
one child struggling with a math problem. Their comments were loud enough to overhear. It was one of the worst cases of adult bullying I’d ever seen. They also tossed in some disparaging remarks about what the teacher was wearing.
I confronted them and reminded them that their behavior was probably being recorded via the store’s surveillance camera. They laughed nervously and quickly put their phone away. And then, worst of all, they used the same excuse middle-schoolers use sheepishly when called out for inappropriate behavior: “Wewere just kidding. We didn’t mean anything by it.”
Children’s learning spaces should be sacred spaces. Children should feel safe to make mistakes without fear of their every error being recorded by those at home with an agenda. Soccer fields have long been spaces for parental trash-talk, but on many levels, things change dramatically when adult iPhones store evidence of any child’s classroom learning journey.
Some will brush this off and say there is no way around it. Others will say some adults will always be unkind. I say we’ve entered a whole new world when school safety not only refers to hand sanitizer, masks and active shooter drills, but now turns classrooms into reality television shows for adults.
When Zoom screens featuring the faces of children in classes are now fair game for open observation, how do we now define “safe learning environments for all?” How do we maintain them? We used to fear Big Brother watching us, but now now, Big Mamaand Poppa are also out there — and they’ve got their “record” buttons lit.
Adult voyeurs with negative agendas don’t belong in the classroom. Nor do judgmental attitudes. School is for teaching and learning.