In ordinary times, some 16% percent of public school students nationally are chronically absent, with higher rates among high school, black and Hispanic students, according to the U.S. Education Department.
Now, with online school, it is up to 80% in some schools. And it would be difficult to measure, but I would suggest that we need to look at what percentage of our students are actually paying attention to us when they are in our classes, CI-based or otherwise, online or traditional. What to do about this?
We must adopt a way to reach kids in a more direct and personal way during class in our buildings or online, or we will lose our jobs. Reaching kids in this way, this real way, cannot be accomplished when we use CI to teach lists of words, thematic units, semantic sets, high frequency verb lists, lists of word for novels, words from a chapter in a textbook, etc. So we need to stop doing those things and find a real way to reach our students, one more consistent with the research. If we don’t change what we think CI is and how we use it (see https://benslavic.com/blog/why-i-prefer-ntci/) then we can easily lose our jobs.
Right now, much is going on behind administrative doors to figure out ways to keep buildings open into the fall and beyond under the new economic guidelines of the future post-virus funding world.
This kind of thing always spells bad news for language teachers. I’m just guessing here, but I see most schools cutting language programs a lot sooner than they cut more “important” programs, like varsity football.