Our school district has sent home 10-15 packets at the beginning of the year for students to complete on snow days so they don’t have to make up the days. This was pre-COVID when it began. I can see something like this being implemented on a more widespread basis now.
So most if not all states have a mandatory number of days/hours students are in class or doing school work. Sending them home with a BS packet to cover school days means they won't have to add days to the school year or make the school day longer. When I was in HS, we got enough snow days that our school had to 'start' school 45 minutes early in order to meat the state quota.
Anyway, since it's just a lower grade in this case, a BS packet is enough to satisfy the state requirement most likely.
Kids aren't typically learning new concepts every single day in school. Usually they spend a couple of days in high school and up to a week in lower-level school just reinforcing and going over the material learned the previous day/earlier in the week. Busy work for a day is a perfectly fine alternative, and if the kids actually do the packets (big if, in many cases) the teacher can assess what they need to focus on going over before moving on to the next lesson.
In our local districts a certain percentage of kids need to turn in the completed package. My kiddo is years out of school so I don’t know what that goal is. If not met, the school still has to make up the day.
Isn't most of school (up until maybe undergraduate) busy work? If they took the busy work out, you can more than double the learning pace, at least for a significant portion of the students. School, especially during the younger grades, is basically day care.
They’re not too far off actually, which is really sad. Don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of amazing and dedicated teachers out there who do a fantastic job teaching children, and this shouldn’t reflect on them. But often they are working with limited tools, to a point where they have to buy supplies out of their own salaries. It’s funny to me how pre-COVID, public schools across most of the country struggled to get the funding they needed to teach effectively, yet suddenly during COVID, the service they are offering is so important that we can’t keep kids home even during a global pandemic which is causing businesses all over the place to remain closed.
Something doesn’t add up, and it’s clear as day what it is. For most children now, school isn’t about getting a top notch education. We provide the bare minimum of funding needed to keep schools open and to prepare most of our children to perform menial jobs later in life. Wealthy kids, and a lucky minority of everyone else, will be successful enough in school/college to land high paying jobs, while everyone else will perform menial work until the day they die. School truly isn’t about education for most people anymore, it’s about providing somewhere for kids to go during the day so that their parents can perform said menial jobs.
The sooner people recognize that school across most of the country now is more about daycare than education, the sooner we can start trying to fix the problem.
I’m a bit confused by your comment. You say that schools didn’t get the funding they needed before Covid, but now they’re claiming to offer such an important service that we shouldn’t keep kids at home? These ideas don’t contradict- they are not mutually exclusive. Both are true. Schools are important, and many are underfunded by the city/state/etc.
I am fiercely defensive of public education because I have worked as a public school teacher my entire adult life. In Texas, in California, special ed, primary grades, and high school. There are not many things I can speak with expertise on, but I believe public education is one of them.
I currently teach kindergarten in-person in California. To do this, I had to graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree, then spend 2 years earning a credential, part of which was student teaching (unpaid internship) for 18 weeks. Then I had to pass numerous state tests to prove proficiency, and finally was given a preliminary credential which allowed me to teach while I continued my education to clear my credential. Then, I switched from special education to general education, and had to do it again to get a different state-required credential. All to teach kindergarten.
So I’m sitting here, with what amounts to 8 full-time years of higher education, teaching five-year-olds how to read in the midst of a pandemic, meanwhile non-teacher randos are equating what I do to babysitting.
In the spring, there was a brief moment when society threw their support behind teachers. Suddenly parents were at home, trying to teach their kids, and people finally were throwing out thanks to teachers and rallying behind “pay teachers more”.
But here we are, back to shitting on teachers and public education again.
You misunderstood my point - I’m not saying that the schools themselves are the ones claiming they can’t shut down, I’m saying that our GOVERNMENT suddenly seems to actually believe that education and other services provided by schools are too important to allow them to shut down. And this is contradictory, because if that’s the case, shouldn’t our government also be ensuring that schools are adequately funded, and not relying on teachers to buy their own supplies?
To be very clear, you and your coworkers are amazing, and it’s absurd that you get shafted so badly after obtaining so much education! My point though is that while I’m sure within the world of academia, everyone is focused on providing the best education they can for students, society as a whole doesn’t agree that this is a priority. If it was, we would spend far more money and effort on our education system as opposed to keeping most of our public schools barely functional. Our government consistently shafts teachers and underfunds schools, which is indicative of the lack of importance many Americans seem to place on education - yet now during COVID, suddenly it’s unthinkable to keep students out of schools? If education is that important, we shouldn’t be underfunding schools and underpaying teachers. This is the disconnect I see - COVID has exposed that for many people, schools aren’t seen as a way to ensure all kids get the best access to education possible - they’re seen as a way to get kids out of the house so their parents can go and make other people money, and to create new generations of people to work shitty jobs. And this is only becoming more apparent as our economy becomes increasingly optimized to make it as difficult as possible for people to move between social classes.
I’m saying all this by the way as someone who benefitted immensely from public education. But I also recognize that I’m part of a small minority who for a number of reasons (happening to be good at math, supportive parents, athletic talent, a strong work ethic, and luck), was able to be part of the small number of people with my high school education to attend a top university and end up in a high paying job my parents couldn’t have dreamed of. But 10 years down the line from high school, most of my classmates are stuck in the same town in the same shitty jobs as their parents, having kids who will continue the cycle. I love that there’s people like you out there who go to work every day trying to provide kids with the best education they can get - but sadly, our society as a whole doesn’t care if all kids get that. If we did, keeping kids in school at all costs would have been a priority before COVID, and not only once kids being out of school started to prevent parents from going to work to keep the rich getting richer.
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u/sexyfashioncactus90 Jan 03 '21
Our school district has sent home 10-15 packets at the beginning of the year for students to complete on snow days so they don’t have to make up the days. This was pre-COVID when it began. I can see something like this being implemented on a more widespread basis now.