First-grade teacher Christine Jarboe expected students to be behind academically in categories like reading. But what she hadn’t counted on was that her children would prove unable to do things such as cutting along a dotted line with scissors. (via WaPo)
“You’d say, ‘Okay, can you show me how to tie your shoes?’ and most of them would just kind of look at me, like, really confused,” Jarboe said. “They really weren’t sure even where to start.”
Lucy’s fingers flew: First the left shoe, then the right. She blew a strand of hair from her forehead. Her friends chanted, “20 ... 21 ... 22 ...” In California’s Oakland Unified School District, principal Roma Groves-Waters said her first weeks and months overseeing Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School this school year were dotted with small troubles.
“They help resolve the student conflicts,” Groves-Waters said, “because kids talk to each other better.”Sean O’Mara, who teaches eighth-grade social studies at Keene Middle School in New Hampshire, said his students this year have no idea how to carry on a class discussion. Many — more than before the pandemic — prefer to work independently and are reluctant to share their ideas with others, much less venture into a discussion.
“And it’s building the fifth-graders’ skills,” Barker added. “Without knowing it, they’re working on their literacy, and their comprehension, because the kindergartners are constantly asking them to explain.”