Thomas Courtney

April 5, 2022

The unanimous conclusion in the educational literature is that 2020 and 2021 will be a generational burden on children. And that’s true. This pandemic has hit us all hard: educators, parents and especially children. We need to discuss ways to fix it, fix it, and keep in mind the ways our taxes can fix it.

However, something quite special is happening in my class right now. It’s something that’s coming out more and more, and I’m not the only one noticing it. It doesn’t show up in the test data and isn’t discussed in any periodicals or books I’ve seen either. But it’s still there – a kind of silver lining under the bulky gray cloud of quarantines and remote learning. I’m not the only one seeing it either.

“They write amazing stories,” Ms Reed said at a rare teachers luncheon last week, “Not that my team last year wrote much online.”

“Read more books than they ever read in my class,” Ms. Petrivelli said. Everyone’s head nodded up and down. “When we were on the computer, it was not the same with computer programs.”

“They’re curious about content in a way that I’ve never seen,” Ms. Flippo said.

I’ve had similar conversations with teachers from coast to coast. I can’t help but think, anecdotally, that many teachers really see something…Something that we have missed in all the articles and stories about the problems our children have now. I started wondering what was going on in the name of the weekly prep periods.

Unfortunately, googling “what’s happening with kids after the pandemic” didn’t help me much, and a lot of sociological evidence hasn’t been collected on the benefits of a pandemic on children. However, as someone with boots in the field, my colleagues and I would like to ask someone smarter than me a few questions to follow up:

As we discussed the children, several friends suggested something that I hadn’t considered. “I had parents with me while we were online, all day,” Ms Flippo said. “I think it certainly has something to do with a few kids getting more engaged now.” What if, we wondered, online parental engagement had effects similar to those parental engagement before Covid? Wouldn’t that be a silver lining to understanding parental engagement and how we can do it better?

“I know that sounds crazy,” Ms. Reed said, “but I actually think some attention spans are longer now!” She went on to explain how children in the years before the pandemic had found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. Now it’s a hodgepodge. “Many of my third graders are quite capable of sitting still for longer periods of time.” Could she be right? The decrease in attention span in recent years is supported by Scientific Research. But my colleagues and I ask ourselves: is the type screen time or some other factor like video conferencing or self-employment from home, actually increased at least some of their attention span in a traditional classroom setting?

Another issue that I have discussed with colleagues is that there is never a time when students are unsupervised on our campuses. Yet, during distance learning, many children were left unsupervised all day. the benefits independent studies of academic achievement has been the subject of extensive research for years. What effect has independence during quarantine had on students’ stamina? At the engagement? On the responsibility of students?

Earlier this year, many children often told me about their joy in being in a physical class. A young man with autism would literally have a visceral reaction to a computer placed near him, and a sigh of relief when it was removed. Other children seemed delighted to be among friends. When was the last time we really thought about what friends mean to each other in our courses? How might we view friendship as a learning engagement tool in the years to come?

Finally, many article was quick to point out that post-pandemic technology will simply be a bigger and more productive part of our lives. However, what if what we saw during the pandemic was that technology has its limits, and the children in front of the screens too? What would this mean for heads of state who buy curricula or provide materials and training for teachers?

Children may not have learned as much as we would have liked in the past two years, but what if we as educators could learn a few positive things ourselves from what they lived at home? We have all read about the negatives. But before we go back to our usual activities, let’s review, research and learn from all the positives that our children have been able to bring back with them.

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Thomas Courtney teaches fifth grade Elementary Chollas-Mead school at San Diego Unified and is a Senior Policy Researcher at Teach Plus California and a member of EdSource’s Teacher Advisory Board.

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