Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[HeartsOfficialMoaner]

11 minutes ago, Thereisalight.. said:

There’s only so many vegetables you can eat  

when I go to Ayr I normally stock up on Quorn or Tofurkey “cold meat” style things as they do for lunch on a sandwich. Fck cooking vegetables for a quick bite to eat at lunch

I do. It is, for me, time consuming and interesting. It's better than watching the covid clock 24-7. 

[bendan]

11 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

For me, this experience has demonstrated the limitations of "self study and remote learning", more than it has their potential.

Yes, it has demonstrated a lot of the problems, but from my perspective as a parent they are problems with the execution, not with the concept. Some teachers have done some really great stuff that made good use of the possibilities. Given that they were thrown into this situation without much warning, I'm sure a larger percentage could do likewise if long term planning and training was done. Hopefully there will be some serious research into what worked and what didn't, and why. 

[Monkey Tennis]

3 minutes ago, bendan said:

Yes, it has demonstrated a lot of the problems, but from my perspective as a parent they are problems with the execution, not with the concept. Some teachers have done some really great stuff that made good use of the possibilities. Given that they were thrown into this situation without much warning, I'm sure a larger percentage could do likewise if long term planning and training was done. Hopefully there will be some serious research into what worked and what didn't, and why. 

Remember though that a lot of kids and households are nothing like yours.

[AyrshireTon]

4 hours ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Standard Grade represented an ideal course for an awful lot of kids, in a way that none of its replacements have managed.

Agree.

We had an SQA woman visit us on an in-service  day. She was pushed on the "no-one really recongnises N4 as a qualification but N5 is too hard for some and you can't do both" thing. She said that it may be possible to one day sit both levels, to everyone's derision that this would be the same as Standard Grade all over again.

I don't think it will happen, as that'll cost them twice as much in markers.

[Skyline Drifter]

8 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

For me, this experience has demonstrated the limitations of "self study and remote learning", more than it has their potential.

This. Though your opinion as a teacher is probably far more important anyway.

I'm pretty embarrassed by the efforts my kids have made in the last 3 months to be honest. I have particular family circumstances which have made things very difficult but I still don't think they, or I, come out of this with any pride. They have by and large spent the last three months on extended holiday, thankfully mostly in pretty decent weather which let them get into the garden (since we were shielding for the first 10 or 11 weeks of it and not allowed off the property). The school did what they could I think probably but we had real issues really achieving anything and I do feel I've failed a bit as a parent in all this. I'm not uneducated myself. I have a degree and professional qualification but I'm not a good teacher. I don't have the patience for it. The kids don't respect me as a teacher either so try as I might have in the initial week or two especially, they just pretty much refused to do stuff.

The school set them Sumdog tasks to do on a weekly basis and I got them to do those but that's pretty basic stuff and took them a couple of hours a week, and when my eldest was struggling with some of it I really wasn't good at trying to help. Teaching  is NOT my forte. We had real problems with accessing any of the IT resources. Despite an array of devices floating about we never did manage to get them working on Teams. Any device I had was either too old or the wrong operating system to run it.  Glow would partly set up on their Kindles but Teams wouldn't, I don't have parental access to set up their Huawei tablets so I've no idea if they would have worked, and whilst it would install on my youngest's phone, it never appeared to work and he never got anything through it. Eventually we just gave up trying to make it work. I'm not inventive, I didn't set them tasks of my own imagination. I asked them to do reading and they pretty much refused unless it was about Star Wars or football depending on which child I was talking to. They've spent most of the last 3 months playing games and watching videos on their tablets. In some cases while I dozed next to them having not finished work until 4am the night before.

A lot of the other software resources just wouldn't work on the Kindle Fires I had or if they did work, weren't all that practical with a touchscreen keyboard set up. Or they wouldn't install on the child profiles. An actual pc or laptop they could have used would maybe have solved it but getting them to share time on it would have been difficult too. A little frustrating when I actually live adjoining the playground of the school and could see the keyworkers kids in there every day!

By the time they go back in August they'll have effectively done almost no schooling for 5 months. As a P5 who was near the top end of his class probably when this all started I'm not massively worried about my youngest. He'll go back and make it up. My eldest going into P7 though struggles a bit and is almost certainly autistic (formal diagnosis is in the pipeline). The five months at the start of a huge year for him, his last in Primary, is vital time he may never make up.

For us remote learning just hasn't worked and I genuinely feared for their education if it had been even half of the norm for much of next year. So today's announcement from Swinney is a massive relief. Hopefully it comes to pass as he's predicting. Quite apart from their education, I also faced the very real possibility of having to give up work or at least back it down to part time if I could have arranged it for the foreseeable future to give me 2 or 3 days a week of childcare if they weren't going back to school and grandparent care wasn't going to be allowed for much longer. It was a very real worry and today lifts a weight off in that respect. It's likely the road ahead will still have some bumps though and I'm still working extremely odd hours for the time being to work round childcare and presumably will be till mid August anyway.

All that said, and it really does worry me, I have genuinely valued spending a lot more time with my boys at a great age than I ever would have in normal circumstances. That's valuable time. I just wish we could have done a bit more productive stuff with it.

[Monkey Tennis]

Just now, AyrshireTon said:

Agree.

We had an SQA woman visit us on an in-service  day. She was pushed on the "no-one really recongnises N4 as a qualification but N5 is too hard for some and you can't do both" thing. She said that it may be possible to one day sit both levels, to everyone's derision that this would be the same as Standard Grade all over again.

I don't think it will happen, as that'll cost them twice as much in markers.

And be difficult to deliver.  

[bendan]

4 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Remember though that a lot of kids and households are nothing like yours.

Yes, I get that, but some kids and households pose challenges to education no matter how it's delivered. I just hope that the problems don't make us think technology or online learning has little to offer. As I said, I'd like to see a four day week with a wee bit of online work set for the three days off. I think that's worth trying. Some subjects seem much better suited to online learning than others, and some of them are areas with teacher recruitment problems, so it would be good to see resources put into this.

[AyrshireTon]

36 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

For me, this experience has demonstrated the limitations of "self study and remote learning", more than it has their potential.

Pros -
They are still given the chance to learn.

Cons - 
Lots of pressure on parents
Even more pressure on parents who are also teachers
Limited and often delayed contact with staff
No real replacement for the real thing

My own time has had the added hassle of contacting  Year Heads to inform them of those not engaging. Some folk are in for a shock if they think they can ignore everything I've set them since March and then walk into my Higher class in August with a quarter of the course already covered.

 

Edited June 23, 2020 by AyrshireTon

[Hauzen]

If kids are having to home school more and more in the future then where are they going to go to get laid and find future spouses? Statue guarding demonstrations?

[Gaz]

3 minutes ago, Skyline Drifter said:

This. Though your opinion as a teacher is probably far more important anyway.

I'm pretty embarrassed by the efforts my kids have made in the last 3 months to be honest. I have particular family circumstances which have made things very difficult but I still don't think they, or I, come out of this with any pride. They have by and large spent the last three months on extended holiday, thankfully mostly in pretty decent weather which let them get into the garden (since we were shielding for the first 10 or 11 weeks of it and not allowed off the property). The school did what they could I think probably but we had real issues really achieving anything and I do feel I've failed a bit as a parent in all this. I'm not uneducated myself. I have a degree and professional qualification but I'm not a good teacher. I don't have the patience for it. The kids don't respect me as a teacher either so try as I might have in the initial week or two especially, they just pretty much refused to do stuff.

The school set them Sumdog tasks to do on a weekly basis and I got them to do those but that's pretty basic stuff and took them a couple of hours a week, and when my eldest was struggling with some of it I really wasn't good at trying to help. Teaching  is NOT my forte. We had real problems with accessing any of the IT resources. Despite an array of devices floating about we never did manage to get them working on Teams. Any device I had was either too old or the wrong operating system to run it.  Glow would partly set up on their Kindles but Teams wouldn't, I don't have parental access to set up their Huawei tablets so I've no idea if they would have worked, and whilst it would install on my youngest's phone, it never appeared to work and he never got anything through it. Eventually we just gave up trying to make it work. I'm not inventive, I didn't set them tasks of my own imagination. I asked them to do reading and they pretty much refused unless it was about Star Wars or football depending on which child I was talking to. They've spent most of the last 3 months playing games and watching videos on their tablets. In some cases while I dozed next to them having not finished work until 4am the night before.

A lot of the other software resources just wouldn't work on the Kindle Fires I had or if they did work, weren't all that practical with a touchscreen keyboard set up. Or they wouldn't install on the child profiles. An actual pc or laptop they could have used would maybe have solved it but getting them to share time on it would have been difficult too. A little frustrating when I actually live adjoining the playground of the school and could see the keyworkers kids in there every day!

By the time they go back in August they'll have effectively done almost no schooling for 5 months. As a P5 who was near the top end of his class probably when this all started I'm not massively worried about my youngest. He'll go back and make it up. My eldest going into P7 though struggles a bit and is almost certainly autistic (formal diagnosis is in the pipeline). The five months at the start of a huge year for him, his last in Primary, is vital time he may never make up.

For us remote learning just hasn't worked and I genuinely feared for their education if it had been even half of the norm for much of next year. So today's announcement from Swinney is a massive relief. Hopefully it comes to pass as he's predicting. Quite apart from their education, I also faced the very real possibility of having to give up work or at least back it down to part time if I could have arranged it for the foreseeable future to give me 2 or 3 days a week of childcare if they weren't going back to school and grandparent care wasn't going to be allowed for much longer. It was a very real worry and today lifts a weight off in that respect. It's likely the road ahead will still have some bumps though and I'm still working extremely odd hours for the time being to work round childcare and presumably will be till mid August anyway.

All that said, and it really does worry me, I have genuinely valued spending a lot more time with my boys at a great age than I ever would have in normal circumstances. That's valuable time. I just wish we could have done a bit more productive stuff with it.

The differences between devices cannot be exaggerated.

I teach maths, and have a regular, yearly battle when it comes to teaching trigonometry. A large number of our pupils don't have a scientific calculator, as their parents don't see the point in buying them when they can use their phone. We don't have the budget to have enough scientific calculators to loan out. So what should be a relatively simple task of teaching pupils to find (say) the Sine of 90 on a scientific calculator can literally take an entire period.

"You need to rotate the screen to get the scientific mode. You need to take your screen lock off to be able to rotate the screen. What do you mean your phone doesn't have a calculator? Can you download one? What do you mean you don't have any data left? Your phone doesn't have any charge? You need to press sine first and then 90 then equals. You need to press 90 first and then sine. Your calculator needs to be in degrees and not radians. No I don't know how to switch it. This is why you need a scientific calculator. Were you listening? You don't have a phone?"

It is an utter nightmare trying to get pupils to use their own technology in schools.

[Gaz]

5 minutes ago, AyrshireTon said:

My own time has had the added hassle of contacting  Year Heads to inform them of those not engaging. Some folk are in for a shock if they think they can ignore everything I've set them since March and then walk into my Higher class in August with a quarter of the course already covered.

I genuinely think the exams next year will be modified ones based on 75% of the content.

Of course, this will raise difficulties for schools who teach topics in a different order (as is their right to do so).

[AyrshireTon]

Just now, Gaz said:

I genuinely think the exams next year will be modified ones based on 75% of the content.

Of course, this will raise difficulties for schools who teach topics in a different order (as is their right to do so).

There's been talk of them being put back a few weeks.

[Marshmallo]

3 minutes ago, Hauzen said:

 where are they going to go to get laid

An American film from 1998?

[Gaz]

Just now, AyrshireTon said:

There's been talk of them being put back a few weeks.

Yeah that's a possibility. Although not without its own challenges of getting them marked and getting results back to pupils in time for university / college admissions etc..

[Skyline Drifter]

5 minutes ago, Gaz said:

The differences between devices cannot be exaggerated.

I teach maths, and have a regular, yearly battle when it comes to teaching trigonometry. A large number of our pupils don't have a scientific calculator, as their parents don't see the point in buying them when they can use their phone. We don't have the budget to have enough scientific calculators to loan out. So what should be a relatively simple task of teaching pupils to find (say) the Sine of 90 on a scientific calculator can literally take an entire period.

"You need to rotate the screen to get the scientific mode. You need to take your screen lock off to be able to rotate the screen. What do you mean your phone doesn't have a calculator? Can you download one? What do you mean you don't have any data left? Your phone doesn't have any charge? You need to press sine first and then 90 then equals. You need to press 90 first and then sine. Your calculator needs to be in degrees and not radians. No I don't know how to switch it. This is why you need a scientific calculator. Were you listening? You don't have a phone?"

It is an utter nightmare trying to get pupils to use their own technology in schools.

I was exactly now old when I learned that if I turn my smartphone sideways the calculator expands to include scientific functions!

Not that I imagine I'll ever need it again but I had no idea my phone did that.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Skyline Drifter

[Gaz]

Just now, Skyline Drifter said:

I was exactly now old when I learned that if I turn my smartphone sideways the calculator expands to include scientific functions!

Not that I imagine I'll ever need it again but I had no idea my phone did that.

I reckon each year I have at least four or five pupils who don't even know their phone has a landscape mode, as they keep it permanently locked to portrait so they can use it lying down in bed.

[bendan]

15 minutes ago, Skyline Drifter said:

This. Though your opinion as a teacher is probably far more important anyway.

I'm pretty embarrassed by the efforts my kids have made in the last 3 months to be honest. I have particular family circumstances which have made things very difficult but I still don't think they, or I, come out of this with any pride. They have by and large spent the last three months on extended holiday, thankfully mostly in pretty decent weather which let them get into the garden (since we were shielding for the first 10 or 11 weeks of it and not allowed off the property). The school did what they could I think probably but we had real issues really achieving anything and I do feel I've failed a bit as a parent in all this. I'm not uneducated myself. I have a degree and professional qualification but I'm not a good teacher. I don't have the patience for it. The kids don't respect me as a teacher either so try as I might have in the initial week or two especially, they just pretty much refused to do stuff.

The school set them Sumdog tasks to do on a weekly basis and I got them to do those but that's pretty basic stuff and took them a couple of hours a week, and when my eldest was struggling with some of it I really wasn't good at trying to help. Teaching  is NOT my forte. We had real problems with accessing any of the IT resources. Despite an array of devices floating about we never did manage to get them working on Teams. Any device I had was either too old or the wrong operating system to run it.  Glow would partly set up on their Kindles but Teams wouldn't, I don't have parental access to set up their Huawei tablets so I've no idea if they would have worked, and whilst it would install on my youngest's phone, it never appeared to work and he never got anything through it. Eventually we just gave up trying to make it work. I'm not inventive, I didn't set them tasks of my own imagination. I asked them to do reading and they pretty much refused unless it was about Star Wars or football depending on which child I was talking to. They've spent most of the last 3 months playing games and watching videos on their tablets. In some cases while I dozed next to them having not finished work until 4am the night before.

A lot of the other software resources just wouldn't work on the Kindle Fires I had or if they did work, weren't all that practical with a touchscreen keyboard set up. Or they wouldn't install on the child profiles. An actual pc or laptop they could have used would maybe have solved it but getting them to share time on it would have been difficult too. A little frustrating when I actually live adjoining the playground of the school and could see the keyworkers kids in there every day!

By the time they go back in August they'll have effectively done almost no schooling for 5 months. As a P5 who was near the top end of his class probably when this all started I'm not massively worried about my youngest. He'll go back and make it up. My eldest going into P7 though struggles a bit and is almost certainly autistic (formal diagnosis is in the pipeline). The five months at the start of a huge year for him, his last in Primary, is vital time he may never make up.

For us remote learning just hasn't worked and I genuinely feared for their education if it had been even half of the norm for much of next year. So today's announcement from Swinney is a massive relief. Hopefully it comes to pass as he's predicting. Quite apart from their education, I also faced the very real possibility of having to give up work or at least back it down to part time if I could have arranged it for the foreseeable future to give me 2 or 3 days a week of childcare if they weren't going back to school and grandparent care wasn't going to be allowed for much longer. It was a very real worry and today lifts a weight off in that respect. It's likely the road ahead will still have some bumps though and I'm still working extremely odd hours for the time being to work round childcare and presumably will be till mid August anyway.

All that said, and it really does worry me, I have genuinely valued spending a lot more time with my boys at a great age than I ever would have in normal circumstances. That's valuable time. I just wish we could have done a bit more productive stuff with it.

I can totally understand how things don't work the way you'd want them to. I've been fortunate in only having one child in school and being furloughed myself. 

I don't think there's much debate about the fact that exclusively online schooling won't work well for most kids. I just hope we don't go back to the traditional model with the idea that online learning should be avoided. I think it can be a good supplement in the right circumstances, but things like the platform, device compatibility, and training of kids and staff are big issues.

[super_carson]

17 minutes ago, Skyline Drifter said:

All that said, and it really does worry me, I have genuinely valued spending a lot more time with my boys at a great age than I ever would have in normal circumstances. That's valuable time. I just wish we could have done a bit more productive stuff with it.

Of course it's been frustrating for parents, you're not teachers and when I say that I don't mean it in a condescending way. I've had several parents ask me why they do work in school but not at home and the simple answer is it's just not an environment where the kids expect to work as much and as parents, you can only do so much when you have to balance your own jobs and homes.  

Councils should  have been more proactive in arranging for the loans of IT equipment that would work with the likes of Teams, and there could have been greater training for staff on the features and expectations.    Instead, we've been pretty much left to figure it out as we went along, with varying degrees of success.   Hopefully this period leaves us better prepared for any similar situation in the future.  

What I would say is you should not be being too harsh on yourself or your kids.  Parents everywhere have been thrown outwith their comfort zones, and kids won't learn if they don't want to.  If you've had positive experiences and valuable time with them at home during the last few months, that can be just as beneficial. 

[peasy23]

For me, this experience has demonstrated the limitations of "self study and remote learning", more than it has their potential.

As a parent of a teenager moving into S3, blended learning long term would be a disaster. My daughter is capable of doing far more than she has managed during lockdown, a classroom is the best setting for her. The assumption is that kids all have the facilities at home to do the work, when that is definitely not the case where we live, in an area which still has a huge number of kids living in deprivation. One of her close friends has no access to a pc or tablet, so has been trying to do work using just her phone. Schooling is not a level playing field for all the children at the best of times, the gap between the haves and the have nots would become even larger if home schooling was to be a long term plan.

[Forest_Fifer]

I was exactly now old when I learned that if I turn my smartphone sideways the calculator expands to include scientific functions!
Not that I imagine I'll ever need it again but I had no idea my phone did that.

On my one (android 10) the calculator works either way, the scientific functions are on a pull out menu on the right hand side.