A Lost Year for Traditional Learning
Students across North Carolina and the United States have largely spent the last year learning virtually, which has thrown age old traditional pedagogy to the wayside. Source.
It has been suspected that students have been struggling during the pandemic, but a recent report from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction revealed that the situation is even worse than some expected: over half of high school students did not pass their end-of-course exams this year, and nearly a fourth of students are at risk of not being able to move in to the next grade up in the next academic year.
Two viewpoints have emerged on this issue: some see this as a serious issue, and a “lost year” of learning, while others argue that the fact that schools have managed to carry out any form of education at all under the circumstances of the pandemic should be seen as an achievement.
Dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, Terry Long argues that students have not only lost academics but also support for their mental health. By fall of 2021, students will have lost between three months and a year of learning depending on location. Long says this is a cause for alarm and highlights long-standing inequities in the US’s educational system. She believes that American needs to build additional support systems for students such as tutors, nurses, and counselors to allow kids to regain a sense of normalcy they lost during the pandemic.
On the contrary, associate professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut, Rachael Gabriel argues that there is not a learning loss because students are still learning during the pandemic even if their acquired knowledge does not show up on standardized tests. Gabriel says that learning cannot be lost but what is lost instead is a, “previously imagined trajectory to a previously imagined future.”
The pandemic has forced students to learn some negative lessons about our education system. First, that their efforts were too often not good enough to succeed in online school. Second, that inequality runs rampant in our country and allowed some school districts to reopen while others did not depending too often on their socioeconomics status. Finally, they learned that we too often assume children live with their parents and that it is safe to do so. It would be preferable for these lessons to never have to be experienced but the pandemic has provided us with an opportunity to focus our attention on these specific problems and prioritize addressing them in the present.
While this year may represent a loss of traditional learning, it also represents a year of persistence and growth despite circumstance. Learning did not stop because of the pandemic and not every lesson taught has been negative.