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Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Teachers seem to be having wildly different experience with distance teaching (draft)

You know what kind of annoys me, when people say, well it's only day one. I don't know about everyone but I like to be able to be successful from the get go, I like to put my kids in a position where they can succeed and I expect the district to do the same for me.

You know what else is starting to wear thing, look how far we have come in just a couple days and we are figuring it out as we go along. These are qualifiers for a less than idea situation and you might as well say, well it is what it is and we all know what that means.

Let me tell you about my experience, which is similar to what other people are going through.

Against my better judgement I built my team over the weekend and set up a weeks worth of lessons. I don't think teachers should work on their personal time but I thought get ahead because you know there will be problems. 

Monday actually started fine. I had everything up and even interacted with a few students, I thought this was going a lot smoother than I expected, until about one o'clock when my team and everything I did disappeared, gone lost to the ether.

My admin which is swamped suggested I call tech support to see if I could get it back. So I did but I have a 50 minute on hold rule so at minute 51 I gave up. Frustrated I grumbled, well tomorrows a new day.

However again against my better judgement I spent last night rebuilding my team and uploading the weeks worth of work I had done and went to the bed at least feeling I wasn't slipping behind.

Well this morning, my team was still there but all the files I uploaded were gone. It gave me an oops/retry message so I guess they could come back, but I won't hold my breath  because I think that would be a bad strategy.

I and by extension my families are not having a good experience, we have not been put in a position where we can succeed.

The thing is I see (online) numerous teachers who don't seem to be having the same experience. I don't know if they are super optimistic or patient or if things are going great for them but I can't imagine such a range of experiences being good overall. This is the thing too, I am glad for them and more than a little jealous, I just hope they realize that maybe it's not good that some teachers and students have it good and some teachers and students don't.

I also believe if we would have waited and slowly built capacity and given people more than a power point and a webinar we would be in a better place.

Being put in a position where all teachers and students can succeed, not to be the first to say look at us we got something out there, should have been the districts goal.

I guess it is what it is.

4 comments:

  1. I don't think that DCPS had to rush to be the first. We have to rush because the state DOE mandated that we begin distance learning on March 23rd. Glitches- wait until Monday when more counties are on, all our students are on. Microsoft and Comcast did not build for this type of traffic. I think that considering we had 3 days to build the system, it's excellent. There have been glitches - lots of them. We got paid for last week, so working over the weekend was really not unpaid time. Will we have to make up the 4 days? No one knows - we can only speculate what the FLDOE will decide. Until then,I will keep making my online work better every day.

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  2. I disagree with you. Teachers were originally told last week was an extension of spring break and around Monday they changed her mind and just because we got paid does not mean teachers should be expected to give up their free time. Also the exact mandate was to begin their distance learning instruction. (see link below) Building capacity, allocating resources and training what we should be doing this week in my opinion, would have made a nice beginning.

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  3. Also what paradigm shift isn't going to have major problems in three days. All this is predictable. What would have been wrong with slowing it down and getting it more right? http://www.fldoe.org/em-response/

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  4. Finally I get it, I don't think you are bad or even wrong in the least from having a different point of view than me. We want to get back out there that's laudable. I would have just rather slow rolled it out.

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