Prior to California’s shelter-in-place, some San Jose State professors already had experience with online teaching. Now working from home, they are witnessing their own children undergo inefficient online-learning strategies.
“As an adult who has experience teaching, even I have trouble sitting in a 45-minute Zoom meeting with colleagues,” said Rosanna Alvarez, Chicana and Chicano studies professor, in a phone interview with the Spartan Daily. “I can’t imagine what in the heck this is like for my kids.”
The California Department of Education put out a remote-learning guidance statement recognizing that there are benefits to online learning such as time shifting, pace shifting and personalization. However, it stated that online courses can also compromise student engagement because of the lack of in-person interactions.
Alvarez is a mother of three: an eighth grader, a fifth grader and a second grader. She said that her children have four-hour online school days but they all have different schedules.
She said her second grader’s class time at home is consistent and the teacher insists on students sitting through the entire teleconference call, similar to an in-person class.
However, Alvarez’s kids still need her help every day.
“If they were in class with [the teacher], I wouldn’t be there,” Alvarez said. “So fingers crossed [my daughter] doesn’t need me, but nine times out of 10 she comes in like ‘Mommy, I need help.’ ”
Alvarez said this experience with her daughters and her own experience teaching online classes showed her that the best way to go about teaching remotely is by offering more one-on-one time with students.
“I'm looking at all three [kids] and I feel like the [teacher] who requires less direct time with them for such prolonged periods is the most effective one,” Alvarez said. “The time that they do have, they're super focused and then they get [their work] done.”
Before the shelter-in-place order, Alvarez said she would set up a biweekly module in her online Chicana and Chicano studies class and offered one-on-one meetings with her students.
“A lot of times, students sign up for an online class because they need flexibility,” Alvarez said. “They have access to me all the time. I have set office hours and I try to do online cafecitos.”
Art and photography lecturer Jonathan Fung said he recognized that his daughter, a tenth grader, is also struggling to adjust to online school.
“She has more homework than before,” Fung said. “Sometimes she is working for four to six hours a day in her room.”
He said his daughter told him that the weekly accumulation of work was the hardest adjustment from in-person classes to online classes.
“She has seven classes and she meets with her teachers through Zoom,” Fung said. “Most of them are once a week. Some might be a little bit more, but that is either to go over the material they are lecturing or redeeming what homework was due.”
As a result, Fung said his daughter’s workload is “kind of like college” and that she's developing time management skills by trying to get her work done ahead of time for the following week.
Fung said this online transition didn’t just prepare his daughter for college, but it also improved his own class and how he connects with his students.
“Zoom has been a good change because when I walk into the lecture hall there's so many students, so it's hard to get to know them all,” Fung said. “Now that I can actually see their faces and their name on screen and have a conversation, being shifted online actually might help me engage students more one on one.”
Political science professor James Brent said that he prefers in-person classes – not just for his SJSU students, but also for his 11-year-old twins.
“It actually becomes hard,” Brent said. “It is difficult to make them remember that this is not a vacation.”
Brent said that both his children and SJSU students are not benefiting from online courses.
“There is something about being in a physical place that I think is really important,” Brent said.
He said some types of classes, such as political science, thrive on immersive discussions and valuable in-person dialogues, which are not easily achievable through wireless networking.
Brent said he doesn’t have the opportunity to go into the amount of detail he would normally.
“As I'm recording these lectures [I understand that] this is just the stripped down version,” Brent said. “The interaction with the students is just absolutely crucial.”
Rosanna Alvarez said that even though this transition is rough for teachers, parents and students alike, being more compassionate and adjusting expectations will help everyone.
“I think a lot of [professors] are either clinging to that sense of normalcy and forcing people to power through [this pandemic],” Alvarez said. “I worry that that might disengage some students in the bigger scheme of things.”
