Notes curated by the Education Team
Middle School Teacher, Saudi Arabia
Original Post (March 26, 2020): “I am a middle school teacher at an international school in Saudi Arabia. We started teaching online classes early, with almost no warning, but luckily we already had some experience with virtual school as we occasionally close for dust storms and heavy rains. Our students and teachers are used to posting and reading online assignments, but now we need to work on entire units online, instead of just individual lessons. As a math teacher, I find the hardest part is assessing learning. It’s so easy to look up the answer to a math problem online! My students tell me they enjoy being at home and working there, but I worry about the weaker students and not being there in person to support them.”
Update (May 2021): We ended up being online the entire 2020–2021 school year in Saudi Arabia, and it was frustrating enough that I have decided to leave teaching. The preliminary novelty and optimism about being online faded away as it became clear that we were still holding the students to high standards. I taught middle school math, and not being able to watch a student write out the steps to solving a problem meant I couldn’t help as much as I wanted to, or even understand how well a student was doing. I had to rely on the students’ telling me how they were doing, and they weren’t always honest. There are some great websites and apps to help share work live, but many of the students preferred not using them as it became more comfortable to “hide,” or they struggled with poor internet connections. Cheating became rampant, on homework and on assessments. Several students checked out completely, not attending classes or doing assignments, just to try to make up for it by obviously cheating on tests. I do worry about how their coping mechanisms for online learning will not help at all when they are back in the classroom in person, and they will be quite behind.
photo: Steinar Engeland for Unsplash
