So, my school is considering transitioning into online classes. I don’t really agree with it; if I wanted to take online classes, I would have signed up for them, but the issue is unprecedented and really out of my hands.
If you’re dealing with the situation, what’s happening and how do you feel about it?
Hey! Here’s my experience thus far.
So the teachers at my school, in my opinion, are grossly underpaid and overworked as it is during the year. So as of right now, only a few teachers have put assignments online. We aren’t going to do virtual lessons, it’s more we teach ourselves, they give us PDF’s of notes and we ask them questions. Simple enough in theory.
What my teachers have been doing is posting two-week schedules of reading, notes, and homework. We are turning it all in online, and I’m not sure what’s up with unit tests now, but whatever.
But here’s what’s happening. Most of the students are pretty lost in terms of learning. Either it’s a motivation problem or just confusion with the curriculum based on what I’m hearing. But the remaining units in AP classes, in particular, are pretty easy in comparison to the earlier stuff, so I honestly don’t see what the big problem is, tbh.
So where am I? Frankly, all things considered, I love the way things have worked out. There’s no getting up illegally early (I’m a night owl), you get to do everything at your own pace (a good or bad thing, depending on your habits heh), and I’ve always prepared for AP tests independently, so this is a nice chance to kind of relax and study at my own pace. This whole online thing has given me a lot of freedom to do things at my own pace, which is something I greatly appreciate. For example, I’m trying to cram in two weeks of work into a day right now because I’ve got better things to study for.
If I’m going to be honest here, I’d say this is a great opportunity to jump ahead of the curve for you. You could get all of your work done in a couple of hours instead of slogging through 8-something hours of school, then study for stuff like AP tests or Olympiad competitions if you’re into that. On the other hand, it’s undeniably tough to teach yourself college level curriculum, and the whole “learn at your own pace” idea can be a double edged sword, depending on your work ethic (although these can be mitigated by things like Khan Academy tbh). Overall, I’d take a positive view on this situation. Make the best of what you have and revel that we’re in the age where you can learn literally anything online, haha. Good luck to you if your school does end up going online, I’m sure you’ll make the most out of it!
We just started online school today and we’re supposed to continue for at least the next two weeks.
Thankfully for me, the administration held a meeting on Friday before the school shut down and required the teachers to submit some sort of a plan for the two weeks, so it’s not too bad. The way it’s working in our school is that we’ve got “office hours” for each class when the teacher will be online so that we can ask questions and they can post work, but other than that, we’re just doing stuff on our own. Most of the work was just assignments similar to what I would have expected if they were absent, so it wasn’t that hard. The other good thing was that most of my teachers already finished the hardest parts of the class, and what was left would have been mostly self-directed anyway, so it wasn’t too bad. Really the only thing course-wise that I’m worried is that we won’t be able to finish the Chemistry curriculum and I’m going to suffer in AP Chem next year because of this.
The biggest issue for me so far is that there’s really nothing to do. Even though a two-week “vacation” sounds great in theory, we’re not supposed to be getting together with friends since school was closed to stop that, and there’s really not much else to do. I’m a very talkative person, so not being to talk to people face to face is really annoying, and talking over the phone/texting just isn’t the same.
Overall, I think the school is doing its best given how unprecedented and unexpected this is, and I’m glad they’re trying to reduce the spread of the disease, but I don’t think the virtual school plan will really work for more than a few weeks. Most of my classes are going okay only because we were in the middle of a topic anyway, so the teacher doesn’t have to explain too much, but if they start covering new material, it’s probably not going to work as well. Then again, I’ve only done this for a day, so it could get better once everyone is used to the format, but for now, I’m not that excited about doing virtual school for much longer, and I’m hoping for people to actually start listening to advice and trying to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.
Wow, that was a lot longer than I expected…
My school district doesn’t have an online learning program at all, they cancelled school for 3 weeks on Friday and have been scrambling to make plans since.
Personally I think students will do fine if they actually value their education, but the unmotivated students… not so much. My math teacher has told us she doubts there’ll be a good online learning program, and what’s likely to happen in the high schools is that PDFs of worksheets/notes get posted online and textbook pages are assigned.
Some of the classes I plan on taking next year, like Spanish 3 and Precalc, do require a good understanding of the previous class so I’m kind of nervous about that. I’ll probably end up feeling the same as udonlord does lol
I personally don’t want to fall behind, so im definitely going to be keeping up with all my classes and doing all the work, and especially since there is literally nothing else to do LOL
Where I live, we just got a shelter in place until April 7th. theoretically we can still go outside but I probably won’t end up going to friends houses
Unfortuantely there’s nothing we can do about this whole situation except try to keep up with schoolwork and wait it out 
stay safe!!
Stay safe to all of y’all too! I’m a senior, so I’m dreading most of this stuff. Like I have all the credits I need to graduate anyways, and most of these classes aren’t prereqs for anything in college so I’m just vibing