As debates nationwide rage over whether to teach schools online or in person, students like Sean Vargas-Arcia have experienced both of their pros and cons.
“I’m much happier personally,” said Sean, 16, a junior at Yonkers Middle High School in New York. As Covid-19 rates varied, he went back and forth between online classes and attended two days a week in person.
It’s stressful to worry about contracting the coronavirus at school, Sean said, who has health problems, including epilepsy and a grandmother living with his family. But his online classes are engulfing him.
“When I’m home, completely remote, it’s more like a sluggish feeling,” he said. “I usually feel anxious and tired and just want nothing more to do with school.”
There is no doubt that the pandemic was difficult for children, whether their schools reopened or not. A flood of research in recent months has found that children and their parents have worrying increases in depression and anxiety. Several studies have found that students – especially the disabled and low-income families – learn less than they should.
But a new study by NBC News and Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School of Education, is one of the first to shed light on the differences between students whose classes were exclusively online and those who could attend. personally at least one day a week.
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The survey last year among more than 10,000 students in 12 U.S. high schools, including Yonkers, found that students who spent time in the classroom reported lower stress and anxiety than their online peers.
While just over half of the students surveyed said they were more stressed about school in 2020 than before, the issue was more pronounced among remote students. 84 percent of remote students reported exhaustion, headaches, insomnia, or other stress-related ailments, compared with 82 percent of the students who were in the classroom some days and 78 percent of the students who were in the classroom full time.
Remote students are also slightly less likely to say that they have an adult where they could go with a personal problem and that they would be slightly more concerned about grades than their peers in the classroom. And the remote students did more homework and reported an average of 90 minutes a week, the study found.
“Distance education – and I think it’s no surprise to anyone – is just more challenging,” said Sarah Miles, director of research and programs at Challenge Success, and one of the study’s leaders. ‘It’s harder for children to feel connected. It is more difficult for teachers, for adults in the school, to make contact, and it is a fundamental element. To be able to teach children, they need to feel safe and connected. All the others rest on top of that. ”
Challenge Success, an organization for education and research for schools, surveys most students in dozens of schools a year to better help teachers and administrators meet their needs. The 12 schools surveyed last fall in Arizona, Texas, New York and the Middle East are demographically similar to the country in terms of student family income, though not necessarily in terms of race, Miles said.
The debate over the reopening of American schools has intensified, with parents and political leaders, including President Joe Biden, loudly calling for schools to reopen and teachers in some parts of the country threatening to walk off the track due to safety concerns . The Biden administration on Friday released guidelines on how to reopen schools safely, with advice on precautions, including masks, social distance and contact tracing.
Miles said the new research does not mean that schools should reopen before safety protocols are put in place. Instead, she said, it shows how important it is to make teachers and staff members feel comfortable returning to the classroom.
“If they are not safe and supported, children will not feel safe,” she said.
But at the same time, she emphasizes the study’s the damage that online learning does.
“We need to prioritize going to a place where everyone feels comfortable going back to school,” Miles said, “because it’s urgent.”
A little magic in the classroom
All the chemical students of Jordan Salhoobi at Yonkers High School get the same lessons at the same time.
Those who wear masks in his classroom hear the same readings and see the same demonstrations as students watching the live stream at home. When he writes or draws on his computer board, students at home see the same images on their screens that students see projected on the wall in the classroom.
But Salhoobi’s students do not get the same benefits, he said.
“In the room you get more eye contact,” he said. ‘On the screen, the child can often sit in front of a window. You can not see them, so it is difficult to make sure they are observant. ”
Although it is difficult to compare the performance of his students, Salhoobi said that his personal students sometimes stay after class for extra help that online students rarely ask for. Online students seem more reluctant to raise their hands and often look tired.
“I think kids actually feel more like they have a purpose in life to come to school and get dressed,” he said.
When Yonkers began offering a hybrid option in October that allows students to attend in person Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday, most students chose to stay online. Only a third of students are currently in the hybrid program, a Yonkers district spokesman said, and many classrooms have left only a handful of students.
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Yonkers principal Jade Sharp said she did not see significant differences in grades or test scores between remote and hybrid students, but that she was not surprised to see data from the surveys showing that her remote students were more stressed. .
“I feel sorry for our students in this Covid situation,” she said, noting that many of her 1,100 high school students have responsibilities at home, such as caring for younger siblings in addition to their schoolwork. Three-quarters come from families that the state considers economically disadvantaged, including many from immigrant families. Some have parents who have lost their jobs. Some lose loved ones to Covid-19. And many are complaining about the social and political tensions of the past year.
The school went to great lengths to support students, Sharp said, limiting teaching to a half-day on “wellness Wednesdays” and offering after-school clubs focused on mental health.
But none of this offers what even a few days in the classroom can do with teachers and peers, said Tara O’Sullivan, who teaches American history at Yonkers.
“There’s a bit of magic that can happen in a classroom,” O’Sullivan said. “There’s nothing like the relationship and energy of children working with each other, the kind of flow of conversations and ideas that are naturally present in person.”
Headache and tension in the eyes
Tanya Palmer, 16, a junior from Yonkers, managed to keep her grades this year – but only because she puts in extra time to make up for what she misses in class.
“I do not feel that I really learn much,” says Tanya, who prefers to stay remote to protect her 75-year-old grandfather, who lives with her family. “It teaches me a lot of things.”
Things have gotten better since the beginning of the school year, when technical errors became more common and teachers continued to adapt. But as she completes her five hours of online classes each day, she regularly looks at hours of extra research and reads to learn the material.
“I get a lot of headaches and eye strain,” she said. “My eyes are so dry, and I also get back pain.”
The NBC News and Challenge Success study found that only students in Yonkers reported an average of 31 minutes more homework this week and 70 minutes more during the week than their classmates in the hybrid program. Although most students did not reach nearly the nine hours of sleep recommended by adolescents, they reported just over six hours, the hybrid students reported that they slept on average about ten minutes more per night than their online peers.
“It’s 10 o’clock and I see her on the computer,” said Tanya Gonzalez, Tanya’s mother. “I get close to her and think maybe she’s watching a video, but no, she’s doing classwork.”
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Sean Vargas-Arcia had more energy when he was in school two days a week, and more ways to understand his coursework, he said, remembering how he struggled this past semester to understand the molecular structure of fatty acids, known as lipids, to visualize until he sees a 3. -D model in his biology classroom.
“I was like, ‘Oh, it helps,’ because I could actually see it, ‘” he said.
These days, though, Sean is back to being fully online. So few students returned when the school reopened last month, after closing for several weeks due to the higher infection rates, that he was the only student in some of his classes. He decided there was not much sense, and now he woke up, walked across his room and sat down without a break before 07:00 to 13:00 in front of a computer. An injury in his schedule puts his mealtime at the end of the day.
As university applications threaten, Sean is worried that his degrees in online classes will suffer, costing him his chance at first-choice Brown University next year.
“There’s a lot of anxiety surrounding my future,” he said.
He also struggles with isolation from his friends. He uses the quiet hours during the summer for reflection and comes out to family and friends as a transgender in September. He announced his name change on social media, but most of his classmates have not seen him in person since.
It was harder this year for students at Yonkers, an academically selective school that brings a diverse mix of students – half Latino, 20 percent white, 15 percent Asian, 13 percent black – from the city of the same name just north of New City. York. Sports and after-school programs are largely gone, and school events, such as the gala that Yonkers traditionally hosts in the spring to celebrate the many cultures in the school, have been canceled.
For some students, keeping their families safe is a small price, said Emma Maher, 17, a junior who chose the online option because her sister has asthma and her grandmother has an immune system.
“The sacrifice is worth it,” she said, “because I appreciate the health of my family and loved ones.”
Thanks to Emma Maher
But educators are concerned about the long-term impact on a generation of children who are stressed, struggling to learn and miss their friends.
“You took away so many of these kids,” said Salhoobi, the chemistry teacher. ‘You took sports away. You have removed interactions. It’s like kids are in jail now that they’re 100 percent online. ”