Delusional and self-serving

Classes in all levels for the AY 2021-2022 opened this week, which also marks the second year in a row of distance learning, either modular or online or a combination of both.

While I support calls for the continuation of the school term, I don’t share in Education Secretary Leonor Briones’ delusional affirmations that ending the previous school year is a success worthy of celebration.

Optimism is good but only if it is genuine; that is, when you have credible data that shows last school year’s distance learning was effective and up to standard. Without scientific data, such optimism is ingenuous at best, and delusional at worst.

From where I am, I see no reason to celebrate. The New York Times report described the situation right: “As jubilant students across the globe trade in online learning for classrooms, millions of children in the Philippines are staying home for the second year in a row because of the pandemic, fanning concerns about a worsening education crisis in a country where access to the internet is uneven.”

I am teaching part-time at a state university where at least three-fourths of the class report intermittent internet connection and lack of equipment such as laptops and smartphones. Last school year, I had to make numerous adjustments in my schedule way beyond my compensated hours. I had to spend a sackful of compassion and time to accommodate the needs of some students who faced technical difficulties.

There were well-meaning suggestions for us teachers to just offer a purely modular set-up for technologically ill-equipped students. But I insisted on having real-time “face-to-face” online interaction with my students, or using a mobile phone if the internet is down. I am not a believer in the integrity of modular learning, especially at the elementary, high school, and undergraduate levels.

There’s a saying that goes: “Sometimes you just have to jump out of the window and grow wings on the way down.” In this grand experiment of distance learning, I tried to improve along the way. I used Google Classroom as the main virtual learning environment for our class, and Zoom as our virtual classroom.

In a virtual classroom, getting the students’ participation is not the same as in in-person classes. So to make my class sessions more interactive, I employed supplemental strategies by using online tools like Google Sheets, Slido, Quizziz. Slido’s interactive polling features, for example, is a better way of asking “Okay, any questions?” in Zoom where I don’t usually hear any feedback.

The policy on grading that was implemented last school year will continue this school year in our university. It means no one is getting a failing grade. A student will either be dropped from the rolls if he fails to achieve the minimum level of participation, or shall be given a grade of ‘Incomplete’ if his grade falls below passing. He is then given a year to remove the temporary grade of ‘Incomplete’.

Last semester, our university likewise implemented two ‘reading breaks’ that lasted for a whole week each. It was done to help students deal with mental health issues associated with home-based distance learning.

We improve as we go on, but it’s too early to be in a celebratory mood. What about those teachers who are not as technologically-inclined as the few others? Or those students who lack ample access to technology? Many students don’t even have a laptop of their own. Some must share a single laptop with three other siblings also doing remote learning.

I sense that there are still unseen factors on quality of learning that are falling through the cracks. The pandemic forced upon us an abrupt transition from face-to-face learning to distance learning. So in the education of our youth under this set-up, we must be cautious and thoughtful, not careless and unrealistic.

Has the Department of Education even conducted a comprehensive scientific study on the effectivity of it distance learning methods? Or are its officials just assuming an optimistic stance without actually having to account for their self-serving assumptions?

The Philippines, with its roughly 27 million students, is one of only a handful of countries that has kept school fully closed throughout the pandemic, joining Venezuela, according to a New York Times report. It coincides with the country having one of the lowest vaccination rates in Asia (16% of the population fully inoculated), and COVID-19 infections soaring due to lack of testing and poor contact tracing.