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When it comes to school reopening, The Little Middle School is doing our very best to find a way that our students and teachers can sustainably minimize the risk of coronavirus transmission.
We can keep students online, sure — we have an online school anyway — but online school was never meant to, on its own, meet all of a child’s social needs every day for an entire year. It’s not sustainable.
Read MoreWhen I was a public school teacher in a small Maine town, we had an intense snowstorm that shut the region down for days.
School was closed for two days. On the third day, my district, alone among the others, decided to open.
The roads weren’t safe. I will never forget the drive in that morning — twenty minutes of intense concentration on a winding road that was already notoriously dangerous and didn’t appear to have been treated with salt.
Read MoreA generation of kids, used to marching from one highly structured activity to another, is learning the magic of being bored.
With virtually every after school activity canceled, they have so much free time that they have gotten their fill of Netflix and video games. They’re looking for something else.
Ray is building computers, piece by piece. Chloe is baking obsessively. Emma is gardening. Kate is learning audio recording techniques. Anna is coding. Rose is drawing for hours on end. Sam is building weird robots out of recycled components, and Daniel built a table out of wood and epoxy.
Read MoreMillions of students all over the world have been engaged in a disastrous experiment in distance learning.
Some districts and classrooms have insisted on a synchronous model where students spend long, painful hours on Zoom; at the other extreme, packets of worksheets are distributed and students are basically on their own.
Why are the results so poor? For one thing, teams of educators in schools and districts everywhere are being asked by administrators who have no experience with distance learning to do a job for which they have no training — and with no time for planning. It’s hard to imagine how such an undertaking could possibly be successful by any definition — it was doomed from the start.
Read MoreWhen I speak of my life as a child growing up in a small town in Maine, I’m not exaggerating or idealizing when I say that there was endless time to play.
Back in the olden days of the 1980s, kindergarten lasted only a half day, there was no homework until third or fourth grade, and children who were barely out of the single digits could roam around on bikes or on foot. Older kids enjoyed a six-hour school day and no carpool — just a short bus ride. Standardized testing was minimal, and we had outdoor recess all the way through middle school. We didn’t have devices or the Internet — we had the woods, the beach, the library, and each other. And lots and lots of snow.
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