Remote teaching making it harder to identify students who need extra help

One month into the school year, Linnet Early, a social studies teacher outside St Louis, has an anxious new ritual: scanning the Zoom squares on her computer screen at the beginning of each class to see which of her sixth-grade students are missing. It is usually quite a few. “I’ll have kids gone for a week, pop in for one class the next, then miss the second class that week,” said Ms Early, who has 100 mostly low-income students spread across eight classes, all online. “It’s hard to know what their struggles are, how to wrap your arms around it.”