Closed Schools: How to Keep up

Daily pills to help students (and families) organize their study in Covid-19 times signed by Marcello Bramati and Lorenzo Sanna, deans and teachers at Faes high schools in Milan. As reported by Time magazine, they are teaching online during the lockdown, in an ongoing experiment in remote learning. Every morning at 8.30 a.m. on panorama.it, starting from March 14, 2020, their advice, tips and good practices for students of all ages.

There are subjects that need daily training. We are talking about the ones of your core course of study, the compulsary subjects for your final high school exam (baccalaureate, IB or A-levels). When you don't go to school, those subjects get dusty. You immediately forget ground rules for a translation from Latin, an exercise in Mathematics or complex Physics. Our advice is to practice them every day.

You will have a weekly workload assigned by your teacher. Try to respect it without giving in to a translation downloaded from the internet, or to an exercise copied who knows how. The school is not open and will not be for some time: you need to think responsibly about your preparation, especially in subjects where it could be very difficult to recover credit.

Have a look at the program you've done up to this point of the year. Then open your books and draw, with a crayon, some traffic lights on the index. Green light if you know the subject so well that you don't have to go over it again. Yellow light if you understand that you need to go back to theory and then practise. Red light if you understand that you have to start anew, because you don't know where to start.

In the case of a yellow light, or red light, the advice is to write to a friend in order to share notes and impressions online. But you could also contact the teacher, through the means of communication allowed by your school during these peculiar times.

These are days when you need to keep your knowledge and your skills trained. You can also try to make up some lost ground. Traffic lights is a method that can help you to be fully aware of what you master. Or what you thought you knew, but that's not the case. We have developed this trick for fundamental subjects that need daily attention, or almost. But you can extend it to every subject. And it could also be useful for the university.