My kids are in high school and I found myself calling their online classes ‘lectures’.
Why?
Through no direct design but rather as a result of function, two hundred plus matric students listened to their teacher, all on mute except for her. Sounds like university, doesn’t it?
Could this 2020 year change how students handle their first year of their degrees? I would be fascinated to see the statistics at the end of 2021.
Can how they manage this time at home give us, as parents, some insight onto which tertiary institution to choose?
Not all tertiary places of study are made equal, thank goodness! I would hope that we could get better at overlooking the prestige when it really doesn’t make a good fit for our child. Statistically the drop out rate is 15% – 22% and the first year failure rate is…well I don’t know, but I’d like to see that comparison when we get there.
If your child has been thriving at home on Teams and Zoom and mass lessons, then you may have been given an insight into whether they should be going to a big university next year or not. Varsities have long bellowed about the poor standard of student coming out of schools, and they are not moaning about marks. Universities are having to bridge the divide between the hand-held classes of school more than ever before.
Is 2020 schooling changing it all?
If your child has been in the group that has not coped well. They maybe have battled to get to online classes, spent much time socialising instead of listening and doing the work. Maybe a big uni is the worst choice for them. A small, personal place where lecturers are more like teachers would give your child the better chance of success.
It is no time to judge, judgement is so 2019, now is the time to be paying attention to how our children are responding. This is the time to get interested in what works for your child rather than forcing them into a box that was created so long ago we can’t even Google the date.
How will you be helping your child make the choices they need to make for next year?
