DOE’s idea for back to school makes no sense

I’ve been hearing a lot about “hybrid learning” in September. According to the Department of Education, there will supposedly be only up to nine students in my regular-sized classrooms. I guess the rest of the students will watch the class online.

At first blush, this may sound better than remote learning. After all, at least some students are in the room.

Here’s the thing, though — I can’t get close to them. I’ll be standing in front of the room glued to a camera. I can’t assess their work, I can’t give them suggestions based on what they’re writing, and I can’t suddenly raise my voice to a ridiculous level when I walk by their desks and catch them nodding off.

Granted, perhaps I can sit up at a desk and observe them working via Google Classroom. I can type live comments and they can respond. Of course, I could do that with a laptop, and I could do it just as well from my dining room, which has been my classroom since April.

Our school has 4,500 students, and the DOE tells our School Leadership Team we can only safely contain about 950-1020. This means our students would report to the building only once weekly under any hybrid model. Is it really worth opening the school buildings and making our kids travel on buses for that?

For those who see us as a babysitting service (which we are not), what are they going to do the other four days a week? The chancellor speaks frequently and eloquently about equity, but under this scenario, working parents, including teachers, will be out of luck 80% of the time. Perhaps in less-crowded schools they’ll only be out of luck half the time, but that’s hardly a consolation.

Every week, we hear something new about COVID. Once you get it, you’re immune. Or you aren’t. Six feet is adequate social distancing. Or it isn’t. Given this everevolving body of knowledge, are we willing to risk the health of our children, their families and my union brothers and sisters so children can sit far away from each other and learn in classes that may as well be online?

In case that’s not enough, consider this: All over the country, grown men and women are failing to wear masks and social distance. Do we seriously expect young children and teenagers, among the most social beings on this planet, to simply stay away from each other in hallways and on buses?

Don’t get me wrong here. I love my job. I want to teach. But teaching, to me, is a physical and all-encompassing thing. In a classroom, I want to be everywhere at once. I want to know what every student is doing. If students aren’t focused, I want to be an alarm bell ringing in their ears, waking them up. I want to show them the English language is a thing of wonder and beauty to be cherished and mastered.

My class is by far the most important one for my newcomers. If they can do what I want them to, they can do pretty much anything else.

I don’t love online learning. It’s no substitute for a living and vibrant class experience. But until we conquer COVID, online learning is the best option we have. Instead of some half-baked solution with no pair work, no group work and no face-to-face exchange, we may as well stick with it and improve it.

We can easily improve online learning for our students. Let’s make sure every one of them has a working device and a safe and peaceful place to work. Let’s make sure they at least show their faces when online. Let’s give teachers real training, as opposed to the slapdash nonsense the DOE gave us in March.

But let’s not risk a second wave of COVID for little or no improvement over what we’re doing now.

Goldstein is an ESL teacher and UFT chapter leader at Francis Lewis High School.