1/ Don’t listen to people telling you corona will/should revolutionize education by showing us how easy it actually is to teach online. It’s not. The best education is socratic and has been since, well, Socrates. No one in the actual process of teaching - nytimes.com/2020/03/21/opi…
2/ teachers and students - likes online. Face-to-face engagement is critical: students need to see teachers’ enthusiasm for the material, get into debates with each other and the instructor, be pushed to pay attention by the classroom environment, and so on. The only people who
/3 like online teaching are administrators and usually for the worst reasons: so they can continue decimating tenure, push teaching onto grossly underpaid adjuncts (‘they’re tech-loving millennials, right?’), and hire more associate deans who make 4x than that adjunct ‘teaching’
4/ 500 students on Skype. People talked the same way about TV in the 50s. We were going to watch lectures, and that failed for the same reason everyone hates online today. Real teaching means getting in the trenches with students; it’s slow, cumbersome, and ‘inefficient,’ but
5/ there’s no substitute. And you know that intuitively already, which is why you read to your kids, do flash cards and puzzles with them, and would only do online for your kids if you had no choice. No amount of trendy tech-enthusiasm will change this.
