Back to school again, virtually
Hiccups as kids go to class online
Monday brought jarring changes and a return to some normalcy for city students, parents and teachers as schools began an unprecedented experiment in remote learning after the coronavirus shutdown.
Students cracked open laptops or homework packets Monday, while parents wrangled restless kids, and teachers reconnected with pupils longing for some structure after a week spent mostly indoors.
“It was good to see them after being in the building last week mostly working with a computer,” said Nate Stripp, a teacher at Middle School 50 in Brooklyn, who arranged a morning Zoom chat with his social studies students.
“I know a lot of them are getting antsy,” he said. “There are kids who have habitual problems in class who were like, ‘Mr. Stripp I just want to go back to school.’ ”
Schools and teachers adopted a wide range of approaches to reaching students confined to their homes. Some, like Stripp, tried live chats with students, while others began by posting assignments that students could work on and turn in at their own pace.
Erica Wilde, an eighthgrade English teacher at Public School 199 in Brooklyn, gave her students a short chapter from “Sherlock Holmes” to read and answer questions on through an online platform called “Imagine Reading,” and told them they could turn in the assignment by the end of the day.
“One thing my principal said was don’t overwhelm them,” she said.
But despite teachers’ best efforts, all the changes proved too much for some students — including 6-year-old Melina Torres from the Bronx.
“It’s too much too fast,” said Vanessa Medina, Melina’s godmother.
“She’s in first grade, and to expect a first-grader to sit at a computer is hard.”
Melina was crying earlier, her godmother said. “She misses her teacher, she misses her friends. You don’t want to yell at them, and you don’t want to get frustrated because you know it’s frustrating for them.”
Fredda Pichardo, a reading intervention teacher for secondand third-graders in Queens, normally works with small groups of students giving careful, real-time feedback. She’s going to try to replicate that process through one-onone video chats.
“That’s going to be my biggest challenge is to listen to them and try to give them feedback,” Pichardo said. “I think about it every day.”
While the shift to remote learning presented hiccups for many families, it was even harder for those without access to sufficient technology at home.
Sarah Horta, a 31-year-old mother in the South Bronx, was splitting two iPads between her five children — all between the ages of 5 and 9 — on Monday.
“It’s frustrating because they’re all not connected to an iPad,” said Horta. Without enough devices to go around, even the most basic tasks are difficult. “You have to log them in so they can have attendance,” she said.
Many city schools have loaned out devices to families—that’s how Horta got one of the two iPads her kids used Monday—but officials estimate there are still potentially hundreds of thousands of families without the capacity for online learning. The Education Department recently ordered 25,000 iPads and plans to buy more.
Horta said her kids’ teachers have been helpful in coming up with ideas to fill the time without technology, but she doesn’t “want to keep on bothering them.”
In the meantime, she improvised, assigning some of her kids art projects or reading while the other kids used the tablets.
For both Horta and Manhattan father Thomas Dunn, who stayed home with his two kids Monday, it was a taste of life as an educator.
“I thought it went really well,” said Dunn.
“I’m a technician for Verizon, but now I’m a New York City public school teacher,” he said with a laugh.