- Social media videos and photos of children struggling with virtual learning are resonating with parents across the nation as their own children navigate the challenges of online classes.
- One viral video from a Missouri mom shows her fifth-grade son crying alone in his bedroom. Another from a mom in Georgia shows her son with his head in his hands.
- With the lack of opportunity to socialize with peers and receive personalized instruction, students learning less from a virtual environment could be another devastating consequence of the
coronavirus pandemic.
Social media posts of children struggling with the challenges of virtual learning reflect the many challenges families are facing while navigating the difficulties of "attending" school remotely.
One video that a mom of a fifth-grader in Missouri shared on Facebook shows her 10-year-old son crying behind the door of his bedroom.
"He was just dealing with it as best he could. I think the video speaks for itself," the mother told the St. Louis Fox-affiliate KTVI. "You're not in that classroom with the teacher teaching and able to have that back and forth dialog. There's a little 10-year-old in front of a computer with 20 other people."
Parents on social media responded to the post, telling the family that they are "not alone."
—Matt (@mattmathes) August 27, 2020
The child's school district told KTVI that they empathize with students who are going through challenges.
"We care about kids' social and emotional well-being," superintendent Shelly Willcott told KTVI. "The last thing we want is for somebody to be so frustrated that they think they're not learning anything."
In Georgia, Jana Coombs, a mom of a 5-year-old boy, posted a photo of her son struggling with his online kindergarten course. In the photo, her son appears to be crying with his head in his hands as he sits in front of his online class.
"I just took that picture because I wanted people to see reality. And then he came over and we hugged and I was crying right along with him," Coombs told WXIA-TV in Atlanta.
A mother of three children in school, in addition to a 7-month-old infant, Coombs told WXIA-TV that her overwhelming challenges of
"You're running from one laptop to another," she told the TV station.
Tiffany Pickering, a single mom of three in Washington, told Fox Q13 how difficult it was for her family to deal with
She said she's particularly struggling with balancing teaching her children in addition to all the other things she has to do. Her daughter also experiences social, emotional, and behavioral challenges.
"She doesn't know what she's supposed to do. I don't know what she's supposed to do," Pickering told Q13. "I'm not a teacher. I'm a nurse; I don't know anything about teaching children."
Data show that remote learning in the pandemic, while inevitable due to the prevalence of the coronavirus in the US, could leave dire long-term consequences for students across the country. Business Insider's Hirsh Chitkara reported that the inability for children to socialize with their peers coupled with the lack of personalized instruction in a virtual setting is among many problems that bar students from an effective educational environment.
US students between the third and eighth grades are anticipated to only reach 70% of reading gains and 50% of math gains of what they would normally learn in a typical school year, according to an estimate from non-profit NWEA based on a sample of 5 million students.
- Read more:
- Over half of kids who took class online in Los Angeles this spring were absent or didn't participate, and other school districts are scrambling to avoid a similar fate
- New research suggests students are learning considerably less from virtual environments
- How the University of North Carolina went from a leader in college reopenings to what the student paper called a 'clusterf---' with 135 coronavirus cases in just 7 days
- Purdue suspended 36 students for partying. It shows how the coronavirus can't stop keggers and college reopenings are doomed.