The first quarter report cards are on the way and for many compulsory school kids there will be little to celebrate. Self the “judgments” return to the primary after 12 years (no more votes in the children’s report card: the Miur decided it a few weeks ago), in middle school you give – literally – the numbers.
What, then, to do to remedy the shortcomings?
We are talking about kids between 11 and 13 years old who entered lower secondary school in the midst of a pandemic, which in recent months they have often followed in fits and starts and that last year they had to learn in the race to be familiar with Meet, Weschool, Classroom, chat, email and everything that involves Dad, distance learning (in the lucky case that this has worked).
In fact, Istat reminded us that, during the last school year, well 8 and a half million children and young people have been forced to interrupt school attendance due to the lack of a stable web connection at home, the absence of an adequate device (how do you follow 4 hours of lessons on the mini-screen of a mobile?), difficulty in having a direct relationship with teachers and peers to get help when needed.
Educational poverty – net of a thousand academic researches – is made up of these little things which, added together, bring 12% of our country’s minors into a situation of serious hardship.
Volunteering and associations have not been idle (read here what Save the Children is doing) and now the first pilot project to support distance learning is starting, precisely for pre-adolescents attending lower secondary school.
Is called Homework @ home, is promoted by De Agostini Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Turin. The idea is very simple: offer qualified distance tutors to fill the scholastic gaps of first and second grade students in difficulty.
It begins this afternoon with the first group, about a hundred boys and girls between 11 and 13 who attend three institutes located in the suburbs of Milan, Turin, Milan: the IC Renzo Pezzani of Milan, in the 0 Corvetto area, the IC Leonardo da Vinci-Frank of Turin, in the Falchera area, the IC Rita Levi Montalcini of Novara, in the Sant’Andrea district).
What’s up with Homework @ home?
For four hours a week (two dedicated to humanities, two to science) every kid can connect for free to this platform e find a tutor dedicated to him and adequately trained to help him with his homework, depending on your specific needs.
Fifteen weeks and six thousand hours of one-to-one distance learning assistance: not bad really, to recover some deficiencies and above all to regain confidence in the school and in oneself.
It is due to Marina Marchisio, teacher of Complementary Mathematics and expert in digital education, the creation of a particularly intuitive platform, which allows easy interaction between children and the tutors assigned to them thanks to synchronous lessons and the ability to share interactive content in an easy way.
The tutors, then, are “special”: they are not the usual professors, but university students who have made available time and energy to help younger students. There are more than fifty, well trained for the task: they come from humanities and scientific faculties, so as to be able to cover the whole program, and it is to be believed that for them too, in digital teaching for a long, too long time this represents a beautiful opportunities for training and growth.
The pilot project is now starting in three schools in Milan, Turin and Novara but the goal for next year it is to double the number of students and reach other cities. Thus transforming the Dad no longer an emergency tool, but a flywheel for education. For anyone, whatever the school, neighborhood or family of origin.
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