School starts next week. We’ll be starting with “online” school which is planned to last about 6 weeks.  Then some kids apparently will be invited to attend in a physical school at least part of the time.

The role of the parents in these difficult times is to support kids and teachers in whatever way they can.  Last year the whole experience was difficult, and exasperating. But Robert thinks he did a good job at not going ballistic after it was clear that Rory was not able to keep up with the workload or even manage the expectations of the many many disparate and complex (and, he would say underbaked free) online learning platforms that were thrown into use.

Robert does  get frustrated. One major problem is that in the case of middle school, each child has 7 teachers.  Each of those teachers is asked to use an online learning platform to push out lesson content.  There is, of course, because of the way we are all (including the teachers most of all) trying our best to deal with all of this in a sane manner lots of confusion.  And learning how to do this stuff is like drinking from a firehose.

What is the problem, you ask?

Here’s one way Robert can start to explain it.

See the below screen, which is from the Google Classroom platform.  It is, of course, a page where the student can have a portal into each of his classes.  Each teacher creates “button” which the student can click to go further into that teacher’s materials, assignments, expectations, links to other platforms, chats, and other communications.

The image below shows three teachers, in the next couple days the other four teachers will add their “buttons.”

This portal page shows, in a very very small very tippy tippy top of the iceberg kind of way, how things devolve into confusion very quickly. You see, each teacher use his or her own different format to for his/her button.  One says “7 Science P2 DeMont”  the other says “Arroyo Per 3”  the last says “Per 4 Tervet Math 7”. Each one different and requiring time to figure out what each button is telling the user.  “7”.  What does that mean?  Oh, I guess it means 7th period.  Oh, no, it means grade 7 in this case.  It also says P2, which we guess means second period.  And DeMont, which we would guess is the teacher’s name.  Moving on, we see “Arroyo Per 3”.  Is there a class named “Arroyo?  There is no reference to grade level. Or the class subject.  The final one lists the period first, then the teacher’s name.  Then the subject and the grade level.  One supposes.

Now, of course, after looking at this portal page for about a minute, one can figure it out.  It is a trivial example, standing alone. But one must remember that this is the very very very top of the iceberg.  After entering into each teacher’s online “class” there are hundreds and hundreds of presentational and organizational choices each teacher needs to make in a huge multi-faceted decision tree.  And each one of them does everything a different way.  So, it is hundreds of decisions multiplied by 7, the number of teachers that each student has.  It takes hours and hours to work through the pages, locations of information, expectations, assignments, deadlines, etc. And it all changes week to week. And try to remember how each teacher does it his/her particular way.

Robert would say that this is the biggest difficulty.  The schools and teachers, totally understandably, have a very hard time grasping that, in the parlance of software platforms, this is a “few-to-many” environment.  Not “one-to-many” (as is elementary school) and not “many to many.”  The teachers and school need to pay way more attention to uniformity, standardization, continuity, and the fact that each kid is navigating a huge set of information.  Every time a child is asked to reference a separate document, or even make a click, uses up his or her energy and tolerance. Problems with presentation and volume multiply exponentially.