Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Gaz]

3 minutes ago, Forest_Fifer said:

20 minutes ago, 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.

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

Mine too, but that just causes a problem for pupils running different versions of Android.

[AyrshireTon]

9 minutes ago, super_carson said:

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. 

This. Since my son began his S3 subjects a few weeks ago he's been really engaged, particularly with the sciences (which I can just about help him with). My daughter (going into S2) on the other hand, would do nothing if allowed to and it's been a real struggle getting her up in the morning and getting her to do something. In the end she's done about half of what was set, and I've had to try to give her a balance of tasks to do (her strengths are subjects I've no real ability with). It doesn't help that I've had to call a halt after lunch each day to start getting my own stuff done.

[Todd_is_God]

I hadn't realised until now that today's daily briefing from Downing Street was the last one.

[Skyline Drifter]

25 minutes ago, bendan said:

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.

My work situation has been 'complicated' also but I've never been furloughed and I'm a single parent with part week custody of the children so it's meant spending half the week at home and then working long days and nights to make up time as much as possible on the days I've not had the kids. Hence dozing off on the chair sometimes when I did. I've not been working anything like full time hours but I've tried to do what I could and my employers have been very understanding.

Personally I'd like to avoid online learning as much as possible, it doesn't really work for me but I accept I'm a dinosaur and it's probably something the kids will need to get used to at least to some extent. I don't know how I'd have coped in education in today's world. When I was at school we had 4 tv channels and the height of computer technology was a ZX Spectrum 48K! I'd have gotten too distracted in today's world I think.

24 minutes ago, super_carson said:

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. 

I agree with this 100%. Parents aren't teachers. Teaching is a profession and a skill, and people should have a lot more appreciation of what teachers do. Some of the best home schooling parents are probably not the better educated but just those with practical skills, imagination and common sense. I suspect I've got neither of the first two and quite possibly not much of the latter!

There was an email from the school at some point early on in this term asking if anyone needed IT equipment to get online. I ignored it at the time, partly because we have about 4 or 5 devices in the house and at the time, having not exhausted trying to make them work, I assumed at least one of them would work for it and partly because I wasn't sure how they were sourcing such things and didn't really want to deny someone else the opportunity by sticking their names down. At the end of the day if it was vital for their futures I could have bought something else that would run it but I was reluctant spend several hundred pounds on something for what was hopefully going to be a short term use. I also didn't really have anywhere to set them up to properly use a computer and worktop.

I agree entirely about the home / work environment. I can't really do the main part of my real job from home as it involves visiting clients at their premises but I can do bits of it and was set up to work from home to an extent if I really wanted to. I never did. I work reasonably long hours and I want to work at my desk in my work environment. If I'm at home I'm not working. There's a tv, there's a couch, etc. There's a pub across the road (though in current circumstances closed of course). When I've not had the kids I've continued to come to work to do work. It's a 5 minute drive from my house and in the first 2 or 3 months I went to work after everyone else had gone and worked through the evenings and nights. I have since moved to a solo room which lets me come and go at more regular hours to an extent (though I am still sitting at my desk now at almost midnight on a Tuesday and I'll be back in early tomorrow). I then won't be back till Sunday though as I've got the kids from Thursday till Sunday lunch. With all that in mind, I can completely understand why the kids wouldn't want to do schoolwork at home. I imagine those who have managed to homeschool best are probably those who have had the ability and space to turn a room into a classroom and set aside specific set times to do work. I couldn't do that.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Skyline Drifter

[Monkey Tennis]

10 minutes ago, peasy23 said:

1 hour ago, Monkey Tennis said:

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.

100% this.

A primary Head Teacher I know, said early on that it would be better if no work was being set, as it would prevent the vast differences in households being exacerbated in the ways you suggest.

She was being a bit facetious, recognising that such a stance would not really be acceptable.  There was a point in there though.  The more schools have done, the more opening of a gap they've been engaged in.

[Skyline Drifter]

10 minutes ago, Forest_Fifer said:

28 minutes ago, 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.

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

 

7 minutes ago, Gaz said:

Mine too, but that just causes a problem for pupils running different versions of Android.

Just had a play about. Don't think mine does that. Couldn't find any way to get the scientific functions on portrait mode.

[RH33]

29 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.

You’re being very hard on your self. All three of mine have reacted very differently to home schooling. I could leave my P4 and know that she would get her maths and language done without much input. My son Who is P6 needed a bit more cajoling. My youngest has been a running battle to do anything but will then do stuff on a Friday at her dads. We’re just too similar and clash. She will do sumdog though as she’s competitive!
There was no new learning issued, consolidation of what’s been covered.

We’ve done baking to cover weight, knife skills another day and stuff round house that are life skills.

Mine have spent way way more time on Xbox/other screens than normal. The girls absolutely love their dance classes but refused to do the online ones as they just didn’t like it.

IIRC your eldest is like mine and is deferred entry, I was so pleased today as he has dyslexia (and dyspraxia) and needs a solid P7 too. Added in I moved their school in August.

You’re boys will be fine and their emotional well being is far more important than five times table at moment.

[Gaz]

I've also found it interesting when newspapers have reported things like "a third of pupils not engaging with any online work" and people are surprised at this.

I suspect anyone who teaches at a typical state school will report that it is very common for lots of pupils not to engage in any work when they're sitting at their desk in class and you're standing in front of them trying to get them to engage, let alone when they're stuck at home with myriad distractions.

[Mark Connolly]

Just now, Gaz said:

I've also found it interesting when newspapers have reported things like "a third of pupils not engaging with any online work" and people are surprised at this.

I suspect anyone who teaches at a typical state school will report that it is very common for lots of pupils not to engage in any work when they're sitting at their desk in class and you're standing in front of them trying to get them to engage, let alone when they're stuck at home with myriad distractions.

Surprised it's as low as a third tbh

[Gaz]

Just now, Mark Connolly said:

Surprised it's as low as a third tbh

Yeah, me too.

I can't blame them too much, though. If I was 16 and effectively given an extra three-months holiday, I'd probably have been doing very little as well.

[peasy23]

Strike 2 on the PGA Tour as Cameron Champ withdraws from the Travelers Championship after returning a positive test for Covid19 during the pre tournament screening. 2nd player in the last 6 or 7 days to test positive.

[eez-eh]

Having been in Asda Girvan a few times I can confirm it’s an absolute dive of a “supermarket”. I don’t see much issue with someone from there coming to Ayr for their shopping.

[Fife Saint]

I had a meeting on Zoom with colleagues a few weeks ago about purchasing 2 metre social distancing signage for our outlets when they reopen. I said at the time, ‘Hold off for now,  it’ll be down to 1m soon enough. The virus is in retreat and the economic imperative is far too strong for the government not to default to the WHO guidelines in due course, and where WM goes the Scottish government will inevitably follow.’ 
Sure enough, the 2m signage that loads of pubs and restaurants (and shops) have already invested in can now go straight in the bin - a complete waste of money for those businesses that committed funds too quickly on the basis of quickly-outmoded guidelines in a rapidly-evolving situation. 
Within 5 mins of Boris standing up in the Commons today, I was getting spam emails from the same Covid-19 ‘industry specialists’ (that up until today tried to sell us 2m signage) advising that their new 1m social distancing-compliant stickers and signage was already in stock and ready to order, all at ‘highly competitive’ prices. Suffice to say no refunds offered on all the 2m crap that is going straight to landfill.
It’s fair to say I’ll be almost as glad to see the back of the parasitic Covid-19 ‘health and safety’ industry, which has been on an even steeper exponential growth rate than the disease, as I’ll be glad to see the back of the virus itself. 
On the issue of football crowds, given recent developments, and having just watched John Swinney pirouette faster than Darcey Bussell on the whole ‘blended learning’ bollocks, it looks we’re now moving towards a more realistic view of risk assessment, even in Scotland. If things keep moving in the right direction, socially-distanced crowds in football stadiums won’t be very far away.
 

Cant you just cut it in half?

[Monkey Tennis]

1 hour 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.

Christ Man.  Stop beating yourself up.

You'd be amazed how common much of your experience here has been.  You've got teachers on here, saying that their own kids haven't necessarily been doing a lot of work.  I can join them - it's been a bit of a battle at times.

Engagement rates in general are low.  There are so many challenges here, some to do with IT, some to do with motivation and plenty to do with the strangeness of it all, and the absence of the kind of instruction and support, kids are used to in school.

I honestly don't think young kids will be hugely damaged in an academic sense by this at all.  The greatest concern I have is for kids whose homes can be nightmares.  Homes where the chance to spend time with your kids is valued, are not going to have seen harm done.

Relax about it.  Holidays soon, removing that pressure and unfounded guilt.  They're then followed, sooner than usual, by something that should resemble normality.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Monkey Tennis

[D.A.F.C]

Don’t get the teacher bashing on here tbh. Why attack them because they have more holidays than you or call them lazy?

Bit ironic on a football forum where we cheer on guys who spend most of their time playing golf or gambling.

 

[Skyline Drifter]

8 minutes ago, RH33 said:

You’re being very hard on your self. All three of mine have reacted very differently to home schooling. I could leave my P4 and know that she would get her maths and language done without much input. My son Who is P6 needed a bit more cajoling. My youngest has been a running battle to do anything but will then do stuff on a Friday at her dads. We’re just too similar and clash. She will do sumdog though as she’s competitive!
There was no new learning issued, consolidation of what’s been covered.

We’ve done baking to cover weight, knife skills another day and stuff round house that are life skills.

Mine have spent way way more time on Xbox/other screens than normal. The girls absolutely love their dance classes but refused to do the online ones as they just didn’t like it.

IIRC your eldest is like mine and is deferred entry, I was so pleased today as he has dyslexia (and dyspraxia) and needs a solid P7 too. Added in I moved their school in August.

You’re boys will be fine and their emotional well being is far more important than five times table at moment.

Rowan? Long time no speak, didn't know you'd changed your username.

Mmm, maybe. I think what I said was true largely. As I say I'm not massively worried about the younger one. He can do anything he wants academically when he sets his mind to it (getting him to actually do so is more awkward but make it a competition and he's front and centre as you say). I think Thomas' lost months will be costly though. Both boys were deferred, though in Steven's case that's because we just didn't want him in the same year as Thomas). They were only a fortnight off being in the next year though anyway, it's not like they were kept back several months.

I probably am hard on myself because I think I should have done better. I have the academic ability to have done it, just not the teaching skills. Maybe I'd have had a better go if I hadn't also been working it round daft hours when I don't have them. More likely that's just another excuse.

The boys are probably just about young enough that a few months missed isn't going to massively harm them. If they'd been 2 or 3 years older it might but then if they'd been 2 or 3 years older they would probably have been better equipped to actually deal with IT stuff themselves and not rely on me to set things up I don't massively understand myself.

[Gordon EF]

15 minutes ago, Gaz said:

I've also found it interesting when newspapers have reported things like "a third of pupils not engaging with any online work" and people are surprised at this.

I suspect anyone who teaches at a typical state school will report that it is very common for lots of pupils not to engage in any work when they're sitting at their desk in class and you're standing in front of them trying to get them to engage, let alone when they're stuck at home with myriad distractions.

I was the kind of kid that always did reasonably well at school but if this had happened back then, absolutely guaranteed I would be treating this like a months long holiday. I'm surprised it's as high as a third as well.

[Jupiter Jazz]

14 minutes ago, peasy23 said:

Strike 2 on the PGA Tour as Cameron Champ withdraws from the Travelers Championship after returning a positive test for Covid19 during the pre tournament screening.

Swing and a miss Champ.

[Skyline Drifter]

3 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Christ Man.  Stop beating yourself up.

You'd be amazed how common much of your experience here has been.  You've got teachers on here, saying that their own kids haven't necessarily been doing a lot of work.  I can join them - it's been a bit of a battle at times.

Engagement rates in general are low.  There are so many challenges here, some to do with IT, some to do with motivation and plenty to do with strangeness of it all, and the absence of the kind of instruction and support, kids are used to in school.

I honestly don't think young kids will be hugely damaged in an academic sense by this at all.  The greatest concern I have is for kids whose homes can be nightmares.  Homes where the chance to spend time with your kids is valued, are not going to have seen harm done.

Relax about it.  Holidays soon, removing that pressure and unfounded guilt.  They're then followed, sooner than usual, by something that should resemble normality.

I didn't really mean to massively beat myself up, though as RH also responded that way it's clearly how it came across. I think I could and should have done better but I'm not massively worried about it, I just fear it's a bad time for Thomas to lose several months. I also absolutely acknowledge that I've spent more time in the company of my boys in the last 3 months than I would in a year in normal circumstances likely. I've had more custody than I would have had normally as it suited respective commitments for them to stay with me more, I've had no significant football distractions and have been forced to be absent from work for long spells.

My main point was that online resources / home schooling / blended learning / call it what you will just didn't work for us and clearly wasn't going to work for us, and that's not because of deprivation or poverty. It's because of lack of motivation and discipline probably, combined with over-commitment elsewhere and issues with IT compatibility. A return to proper schooling cannot come quick enough in some respects but I'll miss the extra time which is heading towards a conclusion now.

[Gordon EF]

14 minutes ago, Jupiter Jazz said:

Swing and a miss Champ.