It’s hard to believe that here we are in May of 2020 and no child in Baltimore is in school – from kollel members to teenage yeshiva boys to girls whose seminary year in Israel was aborted, all the way down to kindergarteners and preschoolers in playgroup. It’s almost like science fiction, a world turned upside down! This is completely unexpected, so schools were caught completely unprepared.
To find out how the new arrangements are working out, I spoke to a handful of teachers, parents, and students. It is not possible to generalize, of course, because each school is dealing with the situation in its own way, and within each school, the teachers are not the same. While I got many varied responses, the one point that was clear across the board is that each family is different. What works for one family may not work for another. Moreover, the situation is evolving as time goes on.
How Much Work Is Too Much?
For parents who are working, even if they’re working at home, things are more complicated than for parents who are not working. And if their children’s schools are keeping the kids busy all day with schoolwork, it can be good or bad, depending on the family situation.
As one mother says, “I want my daughter to keep up with her education, but I also need her help to take care of the younger children, since I’m working.” This mother felt that teachers who have children of their own are more understanding and don’t give the children busywork, just important work. She wants her daughter to learn but not to fill her day with busywork.
Yet the teachers have their hands full, too. One school explained to a concerned mother whose daughter isn’t enjoying recorded classes that their teachers couldn’t give live classes because the teachers are home all day with their own preschool children, who would interrupt live classes.
A father whose preschool daughter has only one short video to watch each day complains, “I’m not getting my money’s worth from the school. I pay tuition, and the school isn’t keeping my daughter busy enough.”
It’s hard to please everyone.
On the Phone or on the Internet
Some schools and yeshivos are having phone conferences with their students, either prerecorded or live, while others are having Zoom classes over the internet.
The obvious question is, do we want to encourage use of the internet or not? As David, a father of five, says, “You can’t learn math without being able to see anything. Why not acknowledge that fact and use Zoom? Let’s stop pretending that the internet isn’t available and use it openly as needed.”
It seems that even the schools that are avoiding Zoom and relying completely on phone use are using email to communicate with their students. Email also involves the internet. As a majority of families in our community has some form of internet in their homes, why not use it in this situation so that students can learn well?
Other parents feel that the convenience of the internet isn’t worth it, even at this time of great need. Yet I heard in the name of a local rav that devices using the internet should be used – now, especially – because they help families who are struggling with school at home. It is easier for children to learn using devices than on the phone.
I thought it would be interesting to hear the thoughts of teenagers themselves about the internet. I spoke to two high schoolers, a boy and a girl. The bachur said, “The internet is a dangerous place. Some people think that they’re the exception and the internet won’t hurt them, but I feel that exposing children to the internet and allowing them to get comfortable with using it can only backfire. Don’t think that you’re too smart to fall into the trap. Many lives have been ruined. A family that has always been careful to avoid the internet completely is correct to continue to avoid it, because once you start using it, it will be very difficult to go back to not using it.”
A Bais Yaakov high schooler told me about her experience using the internet, now that Bais Yaakov is going to be sending out tablets to all their students. These tablets will enable live or recorded classes with video and/or audio in a secure manner using the Zoom platform. This initiative will help make the learning more palatable and easier for the children to participate and to socialize as they do in school.
Here is her take on the situation: “I see girls in my class who are totally immersed in the internet culture, and that causes them to become part of the non-Jewish world. I appreciate all the good parts that I can get from the internet, but I am happy that my parents know how to protect me from the bad parts. Some parents do not realize the dangers and think that their children will not fall into any traps, but they are wrong. The internet is a bottomless pit and parents need to know what is going on in order to protect their children.”
Recorded Classes or Live Classes?
Schools are having a combination of recorded classes and live classes. A fifth grader at Torah Institute told me that he has two recorded classes and two live classes every day. The rebbe takes attendance for the live classes, and there is also an emailed attendance sheet that the student has to fill out. A different rebbe at TI divided the class into thirds so that it would be easier to teach a group of boys with a live class on the phone.
Some children find it difficult to pay attention to a recorded class. One parent reported that she spent a lot of time setting up the device so her son could listen to his recorded class and then found the phone with the recorded lesson under the bed, teaching the mattress, while the boy played.
Communicating with Parents and Children
All of this turmoil requires coordination and communication, and some schools are better at communicating than others.
“I can’t stand getting so many emails from my children’s school,” says Chana, a local parent. “One of my children’s schools seems to have figured it out efficiently. They send one email at the beginning of the week with the whole schedule. Another child’s school sends emails all day and all night. Since we don’t have our own printer, it makes the situation very stressful. One school acknowledged the fact that having many children learning on the phone required more phones and helped us get new phones, while another school just assumed that we’d have enough phones for every child.”
A teacher told me that one of the parents in his class refused to get a phone for his child, so the student cannot always participate in live classes.
“Each of my older children has his or her own email account and I just forward the emails directly to them,” reports Rivka, another parent. “They take care of their own scheduling. It was really exciting for my children to get their own phones. My son has programmed all kinds of alarms into his phone so he knows when his next class is scheduled.”
While some parents are very organized and make sure their children attend every class, others are overwhelmed, and some parents seem less concerned. “I don’t make my children attend all their classes,” explains Rachel. “We choose the ones that we think are important and don’t insist on the rest. Instead, I work with the children myself on extracurricular activities.”
Teaching Remotely
How is teaching on Zoom?
“I hate it,” said Vicki, a preschool teacher. “It’s very hard to keep a bunch of three-year-olds engaged on the computer. Once I taught some ABC letters using motions and no one copied me; they just stared. But when I asked them if I should do it again, they all nodded.”
Vicki has to give five or six half-hour classes most days. The parents often attend together with their children. At times, though, no one shows up to class at all. “In that case, I just leave the computer on and work in my kitchen,” she says.
Esther Kushinsky, a middle school teacher at Darchei Noam Montessori, actually enjoys teaching remotely. “I have to prepare as much as I did for regular school, but I have no discipline problems, which makes the teaching more relaxing,” she relates. “If kids don’t want to behave, they just don’t come! We don’t actually teach on Zoom, we use a different platform called Google Hangouts, which I feel is more user-friendly. Every evening I send the students a list of what they need to ‘bring’ to school the next day. Sometimes there are glitches in the technology, and the Wi-Fi goes down or the video cuts off. It’s a learning curve, but things are getting better as we go along.”
What Do the Kids Think?
The kids I asked had interesting opinions on remote learning.
“It’s a lot less work than I had at school,” a TA middle schooler says, “but it’s much harder to focus. I can really just mute myself and not pay attention at all, if I want to.”
Yitzi, a TI fifth grader, felt that it’s easier to learn at home than it is at school because there are fewer distractions from the other students. He prefers the live classes over the recorded ones because in a recorded class you can’t ask any questions.
“I think that recorded classes are fine for some subjects,” says Tova, a Bais Yaakov middle schooler, “but it’s very hard to learn math and English without being able to see the teacher or the work. I also miss my friends at school. It’s much easier to listen and pay attention in school when you’re there to learn and not at home, where there are a lot of distractions.”
Chana, a fifth grader, shares that her father insists on waking her up at the unearthly hour of 8:30 to listen to a recorded class. She finds it boring; there’s no one to look at, and she doesn’t see why she has to wake up so early when she could listen to the class later in the day.
As always, it was fascinating to hear so many different perspectives. Even though I heard so many different opinions on the new situation we find ourselves in, it’s comforting to know that we’re all in it together. Everyone is living with the same reality. And, as I mentioned in the beginning, things are evolving all the time. Every day there are changes as all the schools try to find a system that works well for most of their students.
Maybe we should take the advice of one of my interviewees, who suggested, “Maybe we should have summer now and start school again in August when this will hopefully be over.” Here’s hoping that the world will turn right side up soon!
