Compare and contrast online teaching and classroom teaching from your lockdown experience
in the form of an article in about 150-200 words.
Answers
Explanation:
For nearly six weeks now, Delhi-based nursery school teacher Meghna Saxena* has spent over five after-work hours a day only on calls with a colleague. The duo brainstorms ideas and plans for their online classes over the Zoom app. A couple of hours more goes into gathering and preparing the items and props. By the time she’s done, it’s often late in the night.
At 11 am, ready with hand-puppets, paper stars, and smiley-face cutouts, Saxena hosts a dozen four-year-olds in a virtual classroom. An hour later, her throat is sore and spirit low as fatigue takes over.
“Much of the hour-long class involves parents dragging the toddlers back to the computer screens and trying to get them interested in what’s happening,” Saxena told Quartz. “These kids don’t understand half our activities even in the real classroom. A teacher on a computer screen would hardly make sense to them.”
Yet, she or her colleagues can’t take these online classes lightly. For one, the kids are joined by their “quick-to-judge” parents who want “value for the fees paid,” Saxena said. Besides, the school vice-principal often shows up to monitor the teachers. “If I mispronounce one word, she stops the class to correct me.”
Saloni Kumar*, who teaches English to middle- and senior-school students at a popular school in Gurugram near Delhi, is usually awake till 3 am almost every night, correcting assignments on her laptop or iPad. “During the classes, I have no way of knowing who is paying attention and who is not. I am going to have a nervous breakdown if this continues. My body and brain are tired,” the 34-year-old said.
Saxena and Kumar are among the hundreds of teachers across the country who have been abruptly pushed into the uncharted “online classes” since India went into lockdown on March 25 in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Theirs are also among the many examples of how exhausting and demotivating the experience has been for the grossly overworked and terribly underpaid tribe of teachers in India.
Source: Times Now via Quartz
Technological challenges
From coping with basics like internet connectivity and India’s notoriously undependable power supply to more structural issues such as curriculum and teaching methods,