In the wake of the truly historic school-canceling winter we’ve had, I have heard this question a few times: why can’t we have online school on Snow Days?
I suppose we could have “Digital Snow Days”…if we solved the following problems.
- Contracts need to be renegotiated to provide for teachers to teach from home.
- A technology for real-time connection needs to be adopted and implemented. (This has to be rigorous, so students can’t fake attendance, but it has to be non-creepy, so school districts aren’t peeking in students’ homes or rooms.)
- Teachers and students need to be guaranteed internet access in-home. (Otherwise, you’ve got them going out in the storm to get to the library or a coffee shop!)
- Acknowledge that any class that requires in-person connection or special tools won’t be held on a Digital Snow Day (this includes gym classes, art classes, ensemble music classes, theatre classes, and more.) And acknowledge that there is a difference between an online discussion of a novel or issue and an in-class discussion.
- When all these problems have been solved, you come to the big problem.
Once you can provide this, you will have to provide this: you will have to provide the option for students to “attend online instead of coming in today.” Every day. The mindset will be: it’s available, why can’t I use it when I have the flu? When I have a headache? When I just feel like staying in my jammies? It will be an impossible argument to win, once the technology is implemented.
And the fact is, the in-person contact, the human connection, is an important part of what school offers. If you make it possible to go without that, something huge will be lost. Our students will be worse off if they don’t get the human connection, and our teachers will be worse off when they can’t teach through connecting on a human level with their students.
There are good reasons why we want kids to attend school, rather than just handing them a library card and wishing them good luck. And one of them is that being in the same room with other humans is good.