A week has passed since the start of the school year, and parents are disappointed with distance learning: "Abandon students" • The Ministry of Education and Minister Galant's office do not publish corona data • The ministry responds to allegations about the quality of distance learning: "We close a decade gap"
Far from learning:
A week has passed since the start of the school year and the beginning of distance learning - and it seems that all the difficulties and failures that the parents warned about, have come true.
Students return to school in the shadow of the Corona // Photo: Yoni Rickner, Moshe Ben Simhon, Paz Bar, Newsenders
As you may recall, from the fifth grade onwards, students also study in schools, but also spend quite a bit of time learning from a distance.
The parents talk about countless problems, and about the fact that in practice learning is almost non-existent.
Zoom lessons have become very short and in-depth, and technical difficulties and cancellation lessons have become routine.
Revital Konrikos from Kfar Saba is the mother of three children who are studying at home this year and another child who is studying in class: Ayala (14), Yoav (12.5), Eitan (10.5) and Viennese (7).
We visited them in preparation for learning from home, and this week we returned to them.
Revital has a full stomach for the education system.
"I have three children at home and they are barely studying," she says. "The eldest daughter, Ayala, studied zooming for a total of three hours, and the son, Yoav, only starts in the seventh grade at 12:00 and until then did not study at all. A lesson at 08:00 in Zoom and then a break, and the lesson after that only at 11:00. Net he studied only for an hour and a half for a whole day. "Because it's the teacher's day off. I do not understand how the students can be abandoned like that."
Maayan is a mother of two children from Rosh HaAyin, whose fifth-grade son studies for three days at school and another three days at home.
"The children do not learn anything," she says, explaining: "They were given five hours of art lessons. The lesson is 10 minutes. Today the teacher told them to write a greeting for children entering first grade, and the previous time he asked them to draw a greeting for Rosh Hashanah. "An English class that was supposed to be zoomed in was simply canceled. A 10-year-old boy finished school at 11:00. There is no significant learning."
The Ministry of Education responded:
"These days we are completing an infrastructure gap of nearly a decade through an allocation of NIS 1.2 billion in favor of innovative technology. As part of this budget, new and experiential content adapted to different ages will be purchased and developed. "In addition to the experience gained by the teachers from the first wave, the ministry conducts extensive training on the subject. The ministry states that the teachers do professional work and that their dedication is worthy of all appreciation."
Meanwhile, although a week has passed since the start of the school year - there are no reliable data on those infected in the education system because the ministry and Minister Galant's office have not yet published them.
Data from the Ministry of Health, which were presented to the Knesset's Education Committee, show that so far the number of people infected in Corona has stood at 172 students in schools and 62 teaching staff.
The data also show that more than 5,000 students and teachers are in isolation.
At the same time, some parents choose not to send their children to school for fear of being infected.
On the other hand, some students choose not to go to the frontal school days - so as not to be exposed to Corona patients.
Or (pseudonym) is a high school student from Petah Tikva.
"Several classes at my school have already gone into isolation, and there are some sick students at the school. I'm not willing to take the risk, so at the moment I have decided that I am not coming to school - and I am not the only one," he says.
"The chaos in a big school"
"The chaos there is so great anyway. You study in groups and also in zoom, and no one knows anymore or notices who comes when, how much and why. I am not willing to take the risk and be anyone's guinea pig."