Google has its uses but…

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At the moment schools in the UK are closed to all children except for those of key workers. So the girls had one term of partially-normal school before Christmas, but apart from that they have been at home since last March, and they are getting their schoolwork delivered via the internet. When this first began of course the teachers were all thrown in at the deep end and had to try very quickly to come up with some way of delivering lessons. At first we understood when this didn’t always work as well as expected. But by now you would think they would have got the hang of it! Practically every day they get one or two assignments, where they have to read or listen to something and then answer questions about it (what used to be called ‘Comprehension’ in my day). The answers have to be submitted online using Google forms. It seems these work fine for multiple choice questions where you simply choose one answer from a list of possible responses, but other than that they are absolutely hopeless. There is usually one multiple choice question, so if they get that right it is marked as correct. Then every time there is at least one question that asks the child to choose two or more answers - but it only allows you to choose one. So of course that is marked as wrong. All the other questions require written responses. But unless the child is incredibly lucky and happens to choose the exact same words, in the exact same order, with the exact same punctuation (and of course spelling) as the teacher has put in as the correct answer, it will be marked as wrong. So this means that every single day, the child gets all the answers correct but gets a score of something like two out of twenty, with lots of red crosses. Although this shouldn’t really matter, it is really disheartening to be told, day after day, that you have got practically everything wrong. In the same way that abusive partners telling a person that they are useless and worthless wears them down until they start to believe it, this is really depressing and certainly doesn’t encourage the child to make more effort - or even any effort! I’m not impressed as you can tell. I only hope real-life teaching is more encouraging than this. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.