Remote Learning: Closed or Open Door?

Daily pills to help students (and families) organize their study in Covid-19 times, when almost one billion children have seen their schools close. 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., their advice, tips and good practices for students of all ages.

There's no doubt about it. In these days not only the concept of time, always suspended, is at the centre of our thoughts, but also everything that concerns spaces. Open space is a concept postponed, no telling when. The closed space, within the walls of the house, has become the narrow horizon in which the family moves, among new shares, struggles and nervousness.

Once a day at least, we are faced with a concrete dilemma: is there enough space for everyone? We all need silence and concentration, some to work, some to study. We all want to keep a corner of our own. Our house that often used to be completely empty, very often free, now risks to become a fighting ground.

Today's reflection focuses on an important advice, in times of restricted and disputed spaces: all the family members deserve their own personal space, physical and emotional, at least in a part of the day. It is a need that must lead parents, spectators of the school from a distance, to take a step back, beyond the threshold of the door that separates them from the desk and the pc of their kids' morning lessons.

Imagine a widespread situation. These days we often see the parents pass behind the young student's shoulders, struggling with his computer. They pass, listen, sometimes sit next to each other. They walk through, from one room to another, by mistake or by necessity. Sometimes they make a comment, in a low voice, on the lesson, on what they perceive of the class, on how the children follow the lessons. All this among doubts, which then become questions, sometimes problems. «But why doesn't my kid intervene?» they ask themselves.

Especially in high school, the study challenge is a daily challenge of growth and identity, a daily struggle to propose, accept oneself, put oneself at stake and expose oneself to the judgment of others.

In usual times, the student faces all this in a loneliness that he lives with a heroic titanism, because the teenager sometimes feels like a hero. In that case, the parents are distant bystanders.

Nowadays, in remote learning and in narrow spaces, our kids face additional struggles: with themselves, with their classmates, with the new technological devices. But that's not enough. At the moment also parents are involved, commenting and walking behind the desk. Let's leave our children alone. And let's keep their roomdoor ajar, with respectful vigilance.