As you all know, there is a global pandemic going on, and that means kids cannot go to school right now. But there had to be some way to get us our education, so our schools turned to online schooling as a way to teach us from home. The pandemic started at the beginning of the year, so we left school around March 15, at the beginning of spring break. At that time, we just thought we were going to have 2 more weeks of spring break and certainly not 6 months of not seeing our friends and teachers. This meant that we have been learning at home for almost one whole school year. The sad part is that we might not even be able to go back to school until the next school year in August 2021. My experience with taking classes on zoom, the video meeting application our school uses have overall been pretty good, but being on the computer most of the day whether it is attending class, doing homework, and procrastinating can burn you out and make you lose motivation to participate and turn things in on time. One good thing about our schedule is that it’s now block scheduling, so our teachers get to teach us 1 hour every other day rather than 20-30 minutes every day. We also have a shortened school day that goes from 9 am to 2:15 pm, with a 30 minute lunch period in the middle. We have all of the regular classes, but instead, we have 4 on Monday, 4 on Tuesday, and we have no school on Wednesday. After that, it goes back to the same classes we had on Monday on Thursday and then the classes we had on Tuesday on Friday. Some subjects like English, French, and history are easy to learn online, because of the amount of out of class work you can do. However, classes like math and science which require in-person activity and participation are more difficult. For example, we had lots of labs for biology scheduled in class that we couldn’t complete at home. But for history, we are just assigned readings for homework and then we discuss them in class. We are just speaking to each other, so we don’t need to be next to each other or in the same room. Although I really miss seeing my friends every day, I also really like being able to wake up later than normal and then just change my clothes and click on a zoom link. At the start of the pandemic, none of us knew that it would carry on this long and get so bad. Through all of this, our education system has done a great job in transitioning to online learning, but there are still many things that we could improve on as quarantine continues into 2021, like less homework and being more in-depth in the topics that the teachers cover.
Thanks for reading this blog post about my 2020-2021 online school experience! Stick around for more posts about my everyday life and special events that happen to me. Until next time!