Lafayette Academy

When can students speak to their teachers face-to face?

In office hours, teachers are available at least once a day for at least an hour to answer student questions in real time. During this time, many teachers are available to through Google Meet - students simply click the link that the teacher posts in their google classroom, and they are able to immediately join a call with their teacher and peers. Though live meets are not feasible for all classes, all teachers are actively checking their emails, G-chat, and google classroom to respond to students and can quickly address any misconceptions or questions that they might have. Here's a more detailed explanation of office hours. 

​How can parents see what students need to do each day?

In your student's google classroom page, there is a tool called "To Do" - it compiles all the assignments that are due in each class as a to-do list. We suggest checking in with your student at least once in the morning and once in the afternoon to to see the assignments they have due for the day.

Can students have live stream lessons so that they can interact with their friends and their teachers?

Some classes are already doing this, and we took  time during "spring break" to develop a plan to incorporate live stream lessons more regularly into the remote learning curriculum. However, in the same way that many of our families are facing a variety of challenges and limitations with remote learning, so to are our teachers; therefore, live streaming lessons may not be possible for every class, but please trust that we are making our best effort to implement them to the extent possible, with as many teachers as is possible. We will give further updates as the situation develops.

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To see when live stream sessions are available, please see the section above for this week's live stream schedule.

Sometimes my student submits work, but it is later marked as missing. Why is this happening?

If a teacher returns work to a student without a grade and the student does not resubmit by the marked deadline, the work will be marked as missing. Usually, teachers do this if work is incomplete or done incorrectly, and the teacher will leave comments on the assignment indicating why it has been returned. This is done with the intention of giving students opportunities to improve and complete their work before a final grade is assigned. 

My student feels overloaded with the number of assignments - can we have more time to complete them, or fewer assignments?

We hear you - thank you for your patience and feedback, it has been instrumental to us as we adjust our instruction accordingly. We have made the following adjustments to help alleviate this problem: 

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1. Extending deadlines to at least 24 hours after work is initially assigned, rather than 3pm on the same day. 

2. Non-core classes will assign work on a weekly basis each Friday, and have moved to a pass/fail grading system.

3. Core classes will only assign work Mondays through Thursdays, with Fridays reserved for noncore classes. 

We're having some technical difficulties opening up some of the documents that are attached as classwork.

Again, we thank you for your patience as we all adjust to online learning. We have since ensured that teachers are posting work as google docs and google slides, which can be edited easily by students, rather than word documents that must be downloaded and uploaded. 

Why are students receiving daily assignments for classes that did not previously meet on a daily basis?

The scheduling has been adjusted so that non-core classes that met only once or twice each week will be assigning remote work on a weekly basis every Friday, rather than a daily basis. These classes will also be scored on a pass/fail grading system. Core classes have also moved to posting assignments four times a week, rather than five times, on Monday through Thursday.