Distance Learning Sucks, but hybrid blows

If the title seems a little crude, it is. It's a throwback to my days as an undergrad at West Virginia University when the Miami Hurricanes and Pittsburg were our arch-rivals. Turns out college students can create some moderately vulgar t-shirts, feel free to ask me about this, but I'm not going to write what the t-shirts said. 😀

Anyway, the sentiment is the same. Distance Learning was bad, but somehow, Hybrid school was even worse. We started the year off with a science teacher who freely (loudly and often) talked about how much he hated teaching online. He made the kids take quizzes in Canvas but didn't allow for retakes. The quizzes were generally 5 questions and often had very similar words that meant opposite things, so as a student with an IEP with accommodations for re-takes, and with a reading disability, these quizzes were nearly impossible. Also, screen readers often do not work well with scientific language.

So, I contacted the SPED teacher to say that our son was really struggling with science and that I didn't know what to do. His response? We could drop it. That's right. The solution to the teacher not following an IEP was to drop the class.

Sidebar for clarity: Inexplicably our district decided to make all middle school kids do distance learning in the afternoons. So, the kids Zoomed from Noon to 4 pm 4 days a week. They only zoomed in half their classes each day and were meant to work on asynchronous work in the mornings for the opposite classes (so, Morning, periods 1,2,3 asynchronous, afternoon, periods 4,5,6 zooming and then the opposite the next day). All of this meant that our son only had access to his SPED class twice a week. And, I don't know about you, but trying to get my kids to go to optional "office hours" was NOT going to work. They were so burned out by 4 hours of zoom that they didn't want to do it anymore!

So, I responded with a definitive, NO. We are not dropping the class. We just wanted our son to get the accommodations that were required by his IEP. This conversation was in November, before Thanksgiving. and by the second week of December, I still hadn't heard anything.

Part of our strategy with our son, for good or bad, has been to try to get him to advocate for himself. This will be a crucial skill for him as he ages. So, I had him talk to his science teacher. They had a 1-on-1 meeting and when our son finished that meeting he was...beside himself. He was rageful, he refused to ever speak to the teacher again. He was so upset that it was difficult to understand what the problem was, but what we did get out of him was that the teacher "didn't believe" in IEPs and made our son feel like he was asking for special treatment when he wanted an opportunity to retake a quiz.

That's when I CC'd the principal on my next email. Here's the email:

[Our son] just had a one-on-one with [the science teacher] and was told that he wouldn't be able to retake any of the quizzes. I'm really at a little bit of a loss here. I was not in his meeting so I don't know exactly what was said, but this is very concerning and also extremely upsetting for [Our son]. Do we need to have a meeting with [the science teacher]? This week is [Our son]'s only opportunity to make anything up for this class. We have been trying to get a second chance to take these quizzes for weeks now.

Again, as part of his IEP he is allowed to re-take tests. Here is a rundown of his accommodations:

Here is a quick list of his accommodations:

1. Access to graphic organizers/transitional words and phrases Opportunity to verbalize ideas before beginning writing Access to tech for writing

2. Access to second set of textbooks or access codes for online use at home

3. Extended time to complete assignments/assessments. (time to work in the Learning Center, or extended deadlines agreed upon with the teacher.)

4. Copies of notes provided

5. Reading intensive assignments/materials provided in advance

6. Access to audiobooks

7. Access to speech to text/text to speech software

8. Access to reading assistance on assignments/tests (as an aside - [Our son] can't use text to speech in science because the robotic voice doesn't pronounce the words correctly)

9. Frequent praise

10. Frequent checking for understanding

11. Opportunity to retake a test after demonstrating a relearn, option to test in the learning center

Any assistance would be helpful.

Suddenly we get told that our son can make up all of the quizzes - it is the last week of the term...so he has to make up like 5 quizzes in one week. So, when he says he's going to write down his answers from the previous quizzes so he can make sure he gets those right, I am not even mad. More power to you bud. Good problem-solving.

But again, after the break, I was emailing the SPED Teacher. The science teacher completely changed the way he was doing things in the second trimester. Quizzes were worth less, and everyone could take them more than once, but there were assignments with long and extensive directions with no lecture or explanation from the teacher. It was all just on your own. Our son did the best he could, but if he didn't follow the directions completely, he got a zero on the assignment. And because of his previous experience with the teacher, he absolutely refused to ask him any questions...I'm assuming if you are still reading, that some of this sounds really familiar to you.

By February, I emailed the science teacher directly. I tried to be polite. It had been more than 2 weeks since I had emailed the SPED teacher and I was still getting nowhere. It wasn't that our son wasn't trying, he was! But if he didn't follow absolutely every single direction on the page, he was given a zero or a 50% with no explanation or helpful information for the future. The teacher's response to my email? He said, Oh...that's interesting, I think I understand the problem and it's a bit to process.

A. Bit. To. Process. Like he's never had a student with an IEP before? He CC'd the principal on his email. I was like, good. Yes, let's let the principal know! UGH!

Sidebar: I have just discoverd that reliving this is REALLY traumatic. When I started writing this particular installment, I didn't remember some of the really horrible stuff. I just blocked it out I guess.

Here is a message that I sent to the district SPED person because I STILL had no movement on anything:

My name is Anna Ingram, and my brother suggested that I contact you regarding the issues we have been trying to work through with 8th-grade science with [teacher's name and school]

I've been trying to navigate this with the SPED teacher for the most part, though I've been in contact with the principal and the science teacher. Most recently, I contacted the science teacher on Monday morning this week and since it has been more than 48 hours since his response on Tuesday, I've decided that I needed to come at this from a different angle.

To be clear, what I want is for my son to receive the accommodations in his classes that are laid out in his IEP so that he can be and feel successful. Distance learning is hard on all of us, but really, it should lend itself to being more inclusive to those students who struggle, not less so.

To give you a bit of background, I've attached multiple emails - the back and forth that we've had since I first realized that my son was really struggling with the science assignments and quizzes. Here's a quick summary of the information contained in those emails:

November 16: I emailed [SPED Teacher] to let him know that I was very concerned about [our son]'s struggles with science class. He'd been getting consistent grades of 50% or worse on quizzes and he was really having a hard time with the delivery of the content.

November 17: [SPED Teacher] responds suggesting that maybe [Our son] should drop science class. I respond that we definitely do NOT want to do that and that all we really want is for [Our son] to get the accommodations that he needs to be successful.

December 1: I send an email to [The Principal] because [Our son] has only been given the opportunity to retake one quiz. My email to [The Principal] includes additional struggles with 6th-grade distance learning as well.

December 2: [The Principal] responds and tells me that a plan has been worked out to retake the quizzes.

December 7: I send an email to the principal and the SPED Teacher. [Our son] had a one-on-one meeting with the science teacher and was told that he would not be able to retake any quizzes. The teacher made him feel like he was asking for special treatment even though [Our son] told him that it was part of his IEP.

I'm sure you understand how difficult it is to convince a 14-year-old to advocate for himself, so being shut down like that was a huge setback and made [Our son] feel like it's useless to try advocating for himself.

December 8: The SPED teacher responds that all of the quizzes have been copied to his class and that [Our son] could retake them any time. (being December 8th, he ended up taking almost every quiz the last week of the trimester.)

January 28: I send an email to [SPED Teacher] regarding the continued struggle with science. The quizzes have been sorted out because now all students can take quizzes twice. But I had discovered that [Our son] received zeros on 2 assignments (even though he did turn something in) and he received 50% of the points on at least one other assignment. The comment on the assignment suggested that [Our son] should re-submit, but in the course of my email correspondence with [SPED Teacher], I discovered that the re-submit button wasn't available.

At some point before February 15th, [Our son] talked to [SPED Teacher] about possibly being able to resubmit the assignments that he got zeros on, but [SPED Teacher] told him that the assignments were locked and nothing could be done.

February 15: I sent a letter to [science teacher] to see if we could figure out what to do. [Our son]'s grade was still a 58% and I am concerned that he will not be able to bring his grade up with these zeros on previous assignments. While I was drafting that email, I discovered that all of the assignments (from the 2nd week of the term) had been graded and commented on between January 26th and 28th. If you'll recall above - the assignments were already locked by the 28th and [Our son] couldn't resubmit. I explained in my email that [Our son] has an IEP with an SLD in reading and writing and that he has dyslexia which makes reading and spelling very difficult for him. He's supposed to receive help on instructions but hasn't been getting that help.

February 16: [science teacher] responds to my email saying that "I think I understand the issues for [Our son] and it is a bit to process." He CC'd [The Principal] and said that he would speak to [SPED Teacher] and that he would get back to me.

It's been more than 48 hours and I still haven't heard anything. The last thing that I will bring up is that I attended a zoom meeting with the district for special education parents back in December. I asked the question about universal design and teachers who are not following IEPs. Here is a link to that question and response. In retrospect, this email to you is 2 months overdue.

The response to this was to excuse all of the assignments from the beginning of the term. I agreed to that because our son had turned the assignments in, he just didn't get any credit for them.

It's worth noting that it was at the beginning of January (or maybe late December?) that I finally asked Wilson Reading for a list of tutors again. It was really a shot in the dark. Wilson is a pretty good program, but it's very expensive to get trained to use it and it really should only be used by someone who is trained. I had previously looked at the list and there wasn't anyone in the Eugene area, but these are different times and while before distance learning I thought that an in-person tutor was the only way to go, I now thought that my son could do online tutoring. Low and behold, there were 2 people on the list of Wilson tutors. I contacted one through LinkedIn and we corresponded a bit and she thought that she could help.

So, a quick recap: our son is really struggling with science, he hates his teacher and his teacher appears to not like him either. He doesn't feel like he's learning anything in the class and yet the SPED teacher is telling us that our son knows more about what's going on in science than any of the other kids that go through his class. Things with school and everything are VERY stressful and I've just decided to make my kid spend another hour on Zoom every week with a woman he doesn't know, doing something that he really hates.

🏆 Hand that woman a trophy, she's mother of the year!

I would like to point out that science was not my son's only class. He was doing fine in ALL of his other classes. And aside from a comment from his Language Arts teacher (Our son turned in an assignment that was apparently riddled with spelling errors and the teacher left a comment on it that said, "Did you spell all these words wrong on purpose?" I set him straight and he did apologize.), things were going pretty smoothly in everything but science.

At the end of the term, I got my son's grade card and he had received a C in science but the teacher wrote that the grade was "modified." So, if you aren't familiar with the language of IEPs or disabilities, then the word "modified" doesn't seem that horrible. However, "modified" is a legal term on an IEP. Modifications are not the same as accommodations and you cannot modify something unless it has been written into the IEP. Our son has a list of accommodations, but NO modifications. So, I had to contact the principal AGAIN and they had to "modify" the grade card so that the word "modified" was removed. UUUUGGGHHHH!

The last term, the kids moved to hybrid school. This was STUPID. My kids were so confused because they changed the way everything was happening. Whereas they were doing opposite classes in the morning and afternoon during distance learning, during hybrid they decided that they would only do half the classes each day. I'm not even going to waste time trying to explain this. It was stupid and pretty much everyone was just DONE. The good news was the science teacher mostly checked out during that last term and the class went okay.

We scheduled our IEP meeting in May - again - and we were really gearing up for high school. Here are a couple of things that happened as bullet points because this post is getting LONG.

• The science teacher was dis-invited from the IEP meeting and the Principal showed up to say how resilient our son had been in the face of adversity.

• Our son decided he wanted to be in the International High School (IHS). IHS is a sort of global education and gives students an option to get an international baccalaureate. It's academically rigorous, is heavy on reading and writing, and is NOT frequented by very many students who have learning disabilities. This terrifies me, but I'm very proud of him.

• Our son is offered the option to skip Physical Science and move right into Biology as a freshman (yes, the irony is strong here). He takes this option.

• The SPED Teacher, who is leaving the district (possibly leaving the profession?) doesn't complete the IEP in time for our meeting with the high school SPED teacher, so even though we have a meeting, we don't really resolve anything.

• Our son continues to work with his new tutor for the summer.

Next up! As if COVID Isn't Bad Enough, Let's Start High School in the Hospital!