Her PE/Health teacher though decided to give her an F though with a note "Little to no participation during shutdown". Ummm, yeah. We homeschooled! What irritates me the most though is that a teacher would slap an F grade on a student who gets good grades without ever having contacted a parent once. I mean I get she probably didn't get the memo that we withdrew but, assuming you thought you had a student that never turned in one assignment or even logged into the online portal, wouldn't you think to check with the parent to see if there was some sort of issue or barrier?
The total difference between the systems all over the place just boggles my childless educator mind.
Meanwhile, in my district, this spring I was running live recorded classes once a week (recorded in case the time slot provided by the district didn't work, connectivity issues, and what-not) and had office hours once a week scheduled and also available by appointment (this happened exactly once). I had four students (out of 140) during the duration of the closure take me up on my office hours (all of whom swore it was great and three of whom insisted they didn't want to tell anybody else how great it was for getting help because they didn't want to lose the one-on-one time, LOL). I had weekly e-mails to families (and a couple of weeks, a second one when developing events occurred that were of great and somewhat immediate interest), and every four weeks reached out specifically to each individual family (with administrators, counselors, and support staff copied) where student contact was slipping noticeably or was absent.
And despite this, no student could receive any grade besides an "A", except for some situations that were so narrowly construed that almost nobody fit the characteristics (you had to be failing pre-closure with three weeks of work in,
no contact post-closure,
and a few other pieces). And those students would get Incompletes. I had a few Incompletes that I thought were fully appropriate based on circumstances and was not permitted to give any of them.
But once kids figured out this was the system, the number of students who started to disengage rose dramatically. Not that I totally blame them, but that's the system I'm nervous to go back to if we go back remotely, even though I'm feeling like remote might be the way we need to go.
I will say this, though: During the closure, the grades and systems I heard about the most were by far from the PE teachers. When I heard what some of them were wanting, man alive, that was crazy!