The pandemic has forced schools to re-engineer schooling from the ground up, and the changes have inadvertently launched an unprecedented experiment in education.
While students say there are very big downsides to remote and hybrid learning, they also hope some changes stick.
Miles Ellis-Novotny, a junior at Burlington High School, said his teachers have started offering office hours on select days to give one-on-one help to students who want it. He’s found the direct support “extremely valuable,” particularly in his AP Calculus class.
“That wasn’t really present prior to going fully remote, for my school at least. And I’d really like to see that continue,” he said.
Others say they’re getting too little support. Mary Jane Skelton, a sophomore at Hazen Union High School in Hardwick, said the current arrangement seems to leave little time for teachers to offer one-on-one help, especially in real-time. Students are split into two groups, each attending school two days a week in-person, and teachers are in school four days a week.
“There’s no opportunity for them to hold Zooms or office hours. And so it’s, it’s messy, because a lot of students are falling behind because of this, because there’s not a lot of support for the curriculum,” she said.
Skelton said it can also be difficult to self-motivate. With so much learning taking place at home and on her own schedule, “if I’m not interested in the material, everything feels optional,” she said.
But that autonomy also comes with some upsides, and Skelton said she’s found that when she does buckle down, she appreciates that her time is really her own.
“Today I got my work done and then I was able to make phone calls for Joe Biden. Things like that, that I’ve been able to do, that I’ve just never had time for,” she said.
Education reforms in Vermont have for years attempted to prod teaching more toward project-based, personalized schooling that decouples how learning is measured from seat-time in a classroom.
Lindsay Beer, a junior at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg, said her teachers are succeeding at weaving lessons between in-person classes and remote work, and she has appreciated that the crisis has made her school reconsider in such a profound way how much time students really need to be inside the school.
“I think that, for a learning experience, it’s almost enhanced it, because now I not only have the traditional curriculum, but also can work on projects at home,” she said.
Another unexpected benefit? The coronavirus crisis has caused the federal government to approve waivers that allow reimbursements to schools if they provide free meals to all students.
“I think this has created, at least in my school, a lot less stigma against school lunches. It’s like, a lot of people get school lunches now, so it’s not as big of a deal,” said Farren Stainton, a freshman at Woodstock Union High School.
Students say they deeply miss the social aspects of school. Covid-era practices mean that, even when they’re physically present, students have fewer opportunities to talk, meet one another and just hang out.
Lunchtime has been dramatically refashioned, for example. Instead of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a noisy cafeteria, most students now eat individually at socially-distanced desks. And extracurriculars have been seriously curtailed or nixed altogether.
Stainton is in her first year at Woodstock Union after spending middle school in Sharon, and it’s been difficult to get to know people.
“I barely know half the people in my class,” she said.
Beer said she misses talking to classmates about things unrelated to that day’s lesson.
“The conversations that would have happened pre-Covid, I guess, just haven’t existed in the same way. And I feel like they’re a lot harder to replicate in a virtual manner,” she said.
But Beer also thinks the pandemic — and the subsequent scramble — have taught both teachers and students how to live with uncertainty.
“We’ve learned to be resilient,” she said.
Ellis-Novotny notes that he was supposed to be taking a metalworking class this semester. But with nearly all in-person learning scrapped for the semester when school officials discovered elevated levels of PCBs — carcinogenic chemicals — inside the Burlington High School building, that class, “surprisingly enough, quite fluidly transitioned into a visual arts class.”
“We’re kind of starting to get the hang of: We really don’t know what’s going to happen next. So we need to figure out how to best adapt to whatever might come our way,” he said.
