This is why teachers are frightened.

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And case in point, our 3rd/4th grade school just announced they are fully remote for the rest of the week due to staff shortages.

In a full remote setting there is the possibility for asynchronous teaching and not just lecture time over Zoom.

Yes for high school/college. Maaaaaaaaybe for middle schoolers with incredibly high executive function. Asynchronous for elementary students is somewhere on the spectrum from useless to actively terrible.

I am watching the inauguration today, or at least trying to. The YouTube thing I am watching started with 45 leaving on the plane and is now on a mostly empty stage with I am not sure what playing over the speakers.

I was listening to the news this morning and heard "yesterday the President" and reflexively braced myself for something awful ... then relaxed and realized it was something sane.

Yes for high school/college. Maaaaaaaaybe for middle schoolers with incredibly high executive function.

You are correct. I am tending to think more middle school and up because that is were more of my experience is. Lower grades get exponentially more difficult. Still at the core of it is the fact that to make any of this really happen we need more teachers, like we have for a long time even before the pandemic.

Y'know, it would be nice if they actually paid teachers enough. Just a thought ....

More teachers, paid at a fairer and attractive rate, is clearly part of the solution. Probably not part of *our* solution though.

I can't even imagine how hard this is for parents, and for kids, and I don't mean to elide that. I know Matilda is hurting, and glam's kids, and so many many more. But it's also pretty clear that many of the steps that would make this workable without putting teachers in the hot seat are just not being done.

There was a time when I had a glimmer of hope that this terrible year would at the very least push some transformations in things that already weren't working well. It fills like more and more of that is slipping away.

This country is doing what we always seem to do, we ignore the transformations that are needed and instead force more work on the underpaid and overworked classes, and then tell them that the reason the country is failing is because they aren't working hard enough, and that they are asking for too much compensation.

That is the American way

I've been trying to work out ways to make my classes more interactive, and it's working out decently in one class, but in the other one, it's getting to the situation where, whenever I ask a question or try to start a discussion, the same two people always answer (and one of them usually doesn't even answer what I asked, but just uses that opportunity to ask about something else completely unrelated), and when I try to get anyone else to participate, I get dead silence. I'm trying some things now where the discussion starts with them typing their answers and then I pick a few to anonymously discuss -- maybe having them type stuff first will get them over the "I don't want to talk" hurdle?

Also, I just sent a work email, and then realized five minutes later that I'd phrased it really badly and it could be read as insulting, so I sent a follow-up apologizing for that and saying that I really respect the work that person does and that email didn't reflect that, and now I'm worried that the apologizing might have just made it worse, and, ugh. I hate social anxiety, and I hate not really having a sense of how these interactions are supposed to work, especially when I'm talking to someone outside my department. With math people, we're kind of expected to be blunt and just say what needs to be said, and this email shouldn't have been written like that, I don't think.