Teachers reflect on online learning

Does the virtual classroom work for all?

When Rappahannock County High School teacher Kreighton Long found out in March that he would have to teach the rest of his Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History class online, he did what any resourceful young teacher would do: he took to YouTube.

“I never studied online education when I was training to become a teacher,” Long said. “Everything was in the classroom face-to-face . . . . Going online was not necessarily something we were trained for. Thank goodness that YouTube can demonstrate a lot of ways to work with students online and come up with different activities.”

Long has taught social studies at Rappahannock County High School (RCHS) for four years. Most of the techniques he would use to motivate students in a traditional setting simply don’t work online. In the spring, Long said, sometimes he couldn’t contact students for weeks, let alone get them to turn in assignments.

“Working online, if kids don’t want to do the work, they're not going to do the work,” he said.

“For some disciplines it was easier to motivate students because they have to understand the first step before they can move on to the next one, like Latin or Spanish. If you don’t have Latin

I or Spanish I, you’re really going to struggle in Spanish II and Latin II. For the humanities, we don’t have that.”

In a typical year, between 25 and 35 RCHS students might be required to attend summer school to recover a class credit or retake a Virginia Standard of Learning (SOL) test. But even though the Virginia governor waived SOL requirements this year, nearly 120 RCHS students needed summer school to finish at least one of their classes.

“The stressful thing is when you make multiple attempts to reach the parents and reach the students and you never hear anything from them,” said RCHS Science Department Chair David Naser. “So when they come back in the fall, they may just have to retake class if it’s required for graduation.”

Naser and Long were two of four teachers tasked with overseeing summer school to help students recover learning from the spring. “There was no new content,” Long said. “It was just like, ‘Hey, you were responsible for turning in these four projects while we were virtual. You did not do this. We’re going to give you another three weeks to turn it in so you can get credit for the class or else we’re going to give you an incomplete.’”

Rappahannock County students are not alone in experiencing loss of motivation. Public charity Future of School conducted a national survey of more than 1,000 teachers who reported that about a third of their students did not complete assignments on time when their classes went virtual.

Add loss of motivation to an already long list of challenges facing students when it comes to remote learning, and achievement disparities between children with a parent at home and children whose parents both work begin to look wider and wider. If some students do not return to school, educators fear their learning losses may set far behind their peers.

“Even in a normal year for math classes, students may forget 50 percent of what they previously learned over the summer,” Naser said. “I think we’re going to be looking at even larger learning gaps than that in some cases, and so we’re going to be playing catch-up.”

Still, Long said that he is torn about reopening.

“On one hand,” he said, “we want to support the best academic growth and provide for the emotional and mental safety of our students by having them in school. And I think especially students who come from at-risk homes or don’t have the best home life . . . I wonder how they are going to suffer. But on the other hand, we want to provide for the physical safety of our students by not exposing them to the virus or at least limiting their exposure to the virus. And so I’m torn between wanting them back full time and wanting them to stay home and be safe.”

For now, both Naser and Long are waiting to see what the Rappahannock County School Board — and parents and students — say they will do in the fall.