n>Teachers are constantly left out of education policy and of making decisions about the things that we know best. We definitely weren’t interviewed about how we thought remote learning should go. But we’re still the ones rolling it out.

Right after schools closed, we called up all of our students’ parents to make sure they were OK. I made probably four or five hours of calls, checking in on the students’ mental health and seeing how they were doing. But there was also a huge push, right away, from the Department of Education, for us to get as many students logged on to Google Classroom as we could. So because none of us teachers had ever used Google Classroom, as we were calling up students’ parents and checking in, we were also learning the system ourselves and then making video tutorials for students on how to log in. We also had to get internet-enabled iPads for students without devices at home. On March 20, I put in three orders for devices for students, but it wasn’t until last week—the last week of April—that all the orders finally came in. It took over a month for some of my students to get their device—it was just crazy. Read Full Article »