I am thankful for the opportunity to share my thoughts about remote teaching and students learning. As we can see from the article, it’s happening all over the country. It makes me wonder how will all of this pan out. The world, social life, community, home life, and any other way of life as we know it has been totally DISRUPTED. This global pandemic has everyone in such a reactive mode. How do we prepare for what’s next without knowing what’s really next? Well, I can say we must learn to be more proactive and educate our community for future events.
Healthcare as we know it must be radically changed to a public health approach for it to be sustainable. Overall, health and wellness has big words behind it but has been ignored as it relates to those practices. There is such stigma with mental health that there are insufficient resources to adequately address the mental needs of all to ensure our well-being. We make an individual responsibility but it is a COLLECTIVE one. I believe the reason for nth wave of this “rona” is the inadequacies of the health care system and other systems that are to respond to such matters. When will “rona” go away and all of this will end? When we change our behaviors and prepare for what’s next.
I am a social worker by profession and training. Yes, I can teach my son but I lack the pedagogical training, knowledge, skill, and experience. I know I’m not the only one who has this struggle with ensuring my son is academically prepared for his next educational endeavor, high school. The community must collaborate to address the needs of the children, our future. It is literally a matter of life and death. The elected officials, school leadership, and teachers, must listen to the parents instead of disregarding their role. Parents must be part of the decision making process. Resources are necessary to teach children and these resources are vital to an enriching educational experience. Adequate, sufficient, and equitable resources must be appropriately allocated. Yes, APPROPRIATELY ALLOCATED!!!
I must say in my son’s school district resources were misallocated and all are suffering as a result, students, faculty, staff, and families. We will see the compounded impacts of this at a later time and it may be too late to say “we should have done…” However, “rona” is giving us a life experience we will forever remember. Yes, we will all be in the history books and discussed for years to come. Just as all of us are being resilient during this traumatic event, let’s acknowledge how our children are holding on because they want to be better than their best.
So who’s the real teacher, I mean really?!?
That’s been the case for social worker Viva White, mother to an eighth-grade special education student in New Jersey’s Newark Public Schools, which announced that classes would be virtual through January 14.
White wishes the school district had made the announcement before the winter holiday instead of toward the end of the break to give parents more time to prepare, but she also said that she understands the decision to switch to remote learning as COVID-19 cases rise.
Streamlining the testing process at schools, requiring students to be vaccinated and providing transparency about the number of active coronavirus cases are some of the measures White argues schools should take to safely stay open.
In the meantime, she’s concerned about how her son, who struggled academically when schools previously went remote for extended periods, will fare this month.
White has been working from home during the pandemic but said that it is difficult to manage her responsibilities as a social worker with her son’s needs when he takes part in remote instruction.
“He sees me at home, so he thinks that I can tend to him, but I can’t really because I have to do work,” she said. “I have two competing priorities, and both are just as important. So, what do you do?”
For the complete article https://19thnews.org/2022/01/moms-omicron-covid-school-closings/
#students #teaching #schools #education #opportunity #workingfromhome #learning #covid #school #socialworker
sistateacher 