Coronavirus: NC teachers are rethinking what school looks like. Be patient

Justin Parmenter was up around 4:30 Monday morning, about the usual time so that he could get some things done before heading to work. As with so many North Carolinians, there’s not much else in his life that’s normal this week.

Parmenter is a seventh-grade English teacher at Waddell Language Academy in Charlotte. Monday was his first day at school since N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper announced Saturday that in response to the Novel Coronavirus, public schools would be closing for two weeks and preparing to teach students online for the foreseeable future. That preparation began last week at districts across the state, and it will continue even after the state’s 1.5 million-plus students start opening their laptops for online learning later this month. Education is being re-imagined in real-time in North Carolina, and no one is sure what that will precisely look like. Students and their families will need to be patient.

“We’re all just at the very beginning with how this is going to work,” Parmenter told the editorial board Monday. Like most teachers across the state, he doesn’t have specific guidance yet from his district. Like most, he does have at least some experience with the intersection of technology and teaching. Teachers have long become comfortable with using online platforms to communicate assignments to their students, and they regularly give quizzes and tests digitally in classrooms.

But teaching via video? That brings questions that not only involve basics like how to record or stream, but capacity issues in older and rural schools. The latter is an issue that districts will grapple with this week, and it’s one that might require short-term investment that goes beyond what local school budgets can meet.

That, however, is only part of what teachers like Parmenter are contemplating today. One big question: How can they mimic all the ways that learning happens? For example, said Parmenter, so much of what goes on in classrooms involves students being physically present and interacting. “They’re bouncing ideas off each other and off me,” he said. “Some of that can be adapted (with video), but not all of it.” Teachers will likely experiment with ways to recreate that dynamic. They will be learning along with the students. It will be bumpy at times.

Parmenter also is worried about access to books - picture books for younger children; novels and other advanced reading for older students. “If kids are going to be stuck in their homes all day, how do we get books in their hands?” he said. It’s a question that districts could include in the discussion about how they might provide food to at-risk students while schools are closed, as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools are doing beginning Tuesday.

All of which is being sorted out - or will be - by districts and their counties and, eventually, state lawmakers. Republicans have boasted for years of the rainy day surplus that’s been built from cutting taxes. The rainy days are here, and lawmakers will face questions soon about the short-and long-term investments they need to make to get their state through the coronavirus crisis.

Teachers, meanwhile, have more immediate concerns. How can they provide healthy learning outlets to their students? What kind of creative opportunities can they offer? In a way, they’re the same questions good educators have always asked. But now, the classroom has changed. Schools are being reinvented, and it will not always be smooth. There will be inconsistencies. There will be things, big and small, that don’t work. Be patient.

This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 1:23 PM.