Trade-Off

 

“Nothing against academics at all… For an academics high school, I can see (online lessons) could happen. 

But an actual trade? Where you’re doing hands-on work? They’re missing out.” 

Mark Chaney, Ohio trade school instructor. 

Remote learning can be a fallback, an opportunity, a necessity, a leveler of access to learning, a convenience or an unmitigated disaster. For those in public primary and secondary school, it was usually difficult, required a degree of discipline – parentally or self-imposed – access to a computer (sometimes provided by the school during the pandemic), access to the Internet (not ubiquitous) and a personal ability to work in that medium without in-person teacher supervision. For most in those pre-college grades, it also seemed to represent at worst a lost year and at best an impaired one. The side benefit is that more young people became computer literate.

But for any category of education where a physical skill was involved, it was a significant if not complete disaster. While even medical school has huge aspects that can be taught online, not so for those in some form of trade school. You can no more learn welding online than you can learn hairstyling or cosmetology. Sort of. For many in those schools and students, learning just plain stopped during the pandemic. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted schools across the country, raising concerns about ‘learning loss.’ For students trying to learn a trade like carpentry, masonry, or welding, that loss is compounded.

“School shutdowns and student quarantines of COVID-19 often choke off the hands-on learning that is the lifeblood of their programs. They lose practice in front of teachers. They lose repetition that increases their speed. And lost hands-on learning then can cost students the hours they need to qualify for state licenses for work after graduating. Adding to Chaney’s frustration, it also wiped out the way many CTE [Career and Technical Education] students learn best…

“They do not like that sitting environment, the paper and pencil and writing,” he said. “They can’t comprehend that. It’s just like me. Everything I do with my hands, that’s how I comprehend everything, so that’s what they’ve got to do.”

“The pandemic has sent teachers of trades across the U.S. scrambling to find ways to somehow fill that gap when students can’t be in the classroom. That has meant finding online lessons created by companies to train their employees, then adapting lessons for students.

“For Sara Plozay, a cosmetics instructor at Upper Valley Career Center in Piqua, a small city north of Dayton, Ohio, it meant having students cut hair on mannequin heads at home, taking pictures, and emailing them to her. Or cutting the hair of their mother or siblings. Over and over.

“‘When students come to a career center, they come to learn a specific career field that provides hands-on training,’ Plozay said. Although her school had just a single quarter of part-time classes at the start of the year, it cost her students dearly. ‘When you don’t have that, you’re really challenged.’…

“But a recent report from the Association for Career & Technical Education (ACTE) estimated that students nationwide lost a great amount of class time: By January, when many schools nationally were starting to open, ACTE estimated that only about a third of CTE schools nationally were fully open. The rest were open only part-time or not at all.

“An ACTE survey of teachers and administrators found that their biggest worries, by far, was finding enough training hours for students and not letting morale and student engagement suffer.” Patrick O’Donnell writing for the May 11th, the74million.org. Schools did the best they could. Some used plastic models of automotive engines, allowed plumbers in training to build using PVC pipes… and some sat idly by with no way transmit skills that required more complex, even dangerous, equipment operated under strict supervision.

It will take years, perhaps decades, to measure the educational and economic losses to the educational system at all levels caused by the pandemic. Families devastated by the pandemic, having training-age young people who lost time and money, some unable to reignite their education for financial reasons, were particularly hard hit: Postponing a career, downgrading skills acquisition, incomplete learning, lack of access to nascent apprenticeship programs, trade schools shutting down, perhaps permanently, and an attitudinal shift that comes from helpless sitting at home, knowing years are just drifting away. 

Apprenticeships and hands-on learning are back with a vengeance, which just might benefit for the revised market demands for certain skilled labor. Unless the former students can no longer afford the process. The notion of bipartisan support for a sufficient infrastructure, economic stimulus package seems to have fallen by the wayside in political gridlock. A major forgiveness of student loans fell off the table a while ago, and the kind of support for all kinds of education, including that precious free community college option, face conservative opposition at every turn. 

“There’s one silver lining to all the time students spent online, though. All the background students need has already been covered, so they can go right to doing projects in their limited time at school.

“A month after returning to the classroom, teachers already have [high school senior Kyrice] Brunson and his classmates rapidly dismantling and rebuilding full V-8 engines from cars.

“‘Since coming back, I think we’ve been sitting at a desk for maybe an hour total,’ [one instructor] said. ‘It has been taking attendance and heading straight to the lab to practice everything we did online.’” O’Donnell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we have to realize that most Americans want to learn, take pride in their work; we need to encourage, invest in and support that ethos to the best of our ability.