I've been working on a post for a few days that hasn't gone well. I can't seem to get the post to say what I mean! So another topic has caught up to me.
The pandemic has caught up to the education system . I don't know if consideration has been given to where things are going. Kids have been out of school for a few weeks. Then they're on line for few weeks. Then they're in school for a few weeks. I doubt that any unit can be completed when they bounce back and forth among types of presentation.
Even though I taught Middle School for my whole career, I have to be somewhat skeptical about public education. I know why I taught but most of society sees only a bunch of facts that have to be carried around.
So today I gave the Micro Manager a few questions on topics the public thinks should be known. Now the Micro Manager is sharp and was a very hard worker. She was at the top of her nursing class! So I asked her a few questions. What's an isosceles triangle? What's the formula for the area of a circle? What's the formula for the volume of a sphere? What's a metaphor? What's alliteration? What's a noun? Then I asked her few historical dates and characters. Some of these she had some idea about what it was but mostly she didn't know.
So here's someone in her 80's and has lived a successful productive life and very few things from school are still with her. The micro Manager has no trouble with logic, judgement, comparison, communication and all those other things used in daily life.
My argument is that a good education should give people skills to find accurate information and make judgements with what they have found. And don't cheat and look for what you want to find instead of what appears.
So I don't think the kids will miss much. There are going to be challenges about entrance to post secondary education unless adjustments can be made to take into account what has happened. It looks like schools will be influenced for about two years .
I'm also sure that some new teaching strategy will be discovered as well. There will be some positives that come out of the pandemic situation.
