(Published in the San Jose Mercury News on August 22, 2021)
Until
COVID-19, I never taught a class online. As a math professor, I found the idea
of remote teaching as remote as the Milky Way. So, when forced to switch to
online by the pandemic in the early spring of 2020, the sky fell on me. After
the mist had cleared, however, I found to my surprise that I could do it,
helped immeasurably by rigorous online training on the best practices of remote
teaching by an expert at my college.
As students
and teachers prepare to return to classrooms this fall, equally affecting
parents because of the stress they endured with their children’s education
during the pandemic, I want to share some insights from my online experience
that may be useful for all three groups across grades and disciplines. Of
course, the deadly delta variant can still blow away our best-laid plans with
the force of a tornado,
First, online
instruction en masse has gone through its trial by fire for almost two years
and has proved its viability. Sure, it has drawbacks — screen fatigue, family
fracture, unequal access to technology, widening performance gaps — but, by and
large, remote education succeeded as a practical and scalable alternative to
in-person teaching. Besides, there were advantages to virtual classrooms:
“anytime, anywhere” flexibility, dispensing with the need to get ready and
arrive in schools on time, and similar school-day overheads.
Second, and
more importantly, online teaching has raised the bar for classroom teaching. If
online teaching was good, in-person teaching must be better, a fervent wish of
parents heightened by the pandemic. This requires that teachers be more
deliberate in inspiring deep learning, critical thinking, and creativity among
students. Deep learning demands greater depth on fewer topics instead of
shallow discussions on many. Critical thinking requires students to think
clearly, logically, and independently. Creativity requires dealing with
uncertainty, seeing connections between disciplines, and solving real-world
problems from different angles.
This can
happen only if teachers invest the time and the effort to create empathic,
engaging and equitable classroom environments, from kindergarten to
postsecondary education. Some teachers have the gift of inspiring the joy of
learning in their students but most of us, myself included, must work at it.
An example
will clarify. Discussing hypothesis tests in statistics, I challenged my
students to define false positive and false negative in the context of
coronavirus testing and identify which one posed the greater threat. I gave
them the sample sizes that Moderna and Pfizer used for their control and
treatment groups and the number of subsequent coronavirus infections in each
group to figure out the success rate of the vaccines. Students were animated
and invigorated. They had taken control of their own learning. I realized that
if I could do this in a virtual classroom, I should do even better in a
face-to-face setting.
After almost
two years of online experience, it is clear to me that we need to radically
rethink the way we teach and students learn. We must challenge our students
with real-world problems beyond the textbook that compel them to think, ask
deep and imaginative questions, and reflect on what it means to live a life of
meaning and purpose. Good teaching, the ability to teach a subject well, is
hard. Great teaching, the ability to care for students and inspire in them a
passion for knowledge, is harder. It’s the latter that must be our goal when
normalcy returns, for “education,” as W.B. Yeats said, “is not the filling of a
pail but the lighting of a fire.”
