Episode 16: A Reflection on Online School (10/29/2020)

Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Today, instead of bringing you along to things I want to learn about, I want to open up a different window to my world and have a little reflective talk.

Today’s episode: a reflection on online school and whether I think we should go back or not.

Before I get into the deep stuff, I want to first preface this with the fact that I love my teachers and I know they work so hard and none of the problems with online school are their fault. Okay, some are, but the vast majority aren’t!

Let’s go back in time to March 13, the last day of school before we all got sent home because of COVID-19. The world was a very, very different place in March. We were given enough work for the next two weeks, and then we were sent on our merry way. Nobody expected the next two weeks to be good education, even the teachers, who had so little time to prepare. The reality of the situation met expectations, until we found out that we weren’t going to be coming back.

It was in those two weeks that I had my first ever Zoom meeting. I had used Google Hangouts before, and Skype, but now Zoom was the next big thing. I only had a few calls per week, maybe one or two per class, but it felt like a lot. Neither my sister nor I had a good designated workspace, so it was kind of a hassle every time we had to get on a call. Around this time, my mom had just gotten a new job, but was already working from home, so our daily routine became very different, very fast. I remember time moving so slowly. It felt like I would never adjust, and I was just living in this weird limbo space all the time.

After the two weeks of very confusing and disorganized at-home school, we went on to a week of spring break. I don’t know what my teachers were up to during that week, but I expect they were doing lots of training and planning, trying to figure out what we were going to be doing for the next indefinite amount of time. Time, of course, was not moving in any sort of sensible or predictable manner, and it was probably around this time when I started to forget what day it was.

After spring break, we settled into a more regular routine. Some of my classes had pretty regular schedules, a reasonable workload, and generally worked with what we had. Other classes, like Latin, for instance, would have a couple Zoom calls a week and then disappear for three, or promise to post our weekly vocabulary quiz and not put it up until the following week, or even the following month. Eventually, I stopped going to those calls. It’s not my proudest moment, but I think all of us can attest to the fact that online school in the spring was really, really hard. Sometimes, people slipped through the cracks.

Eventually, AP exams rolled around, and those were terrible for a whole host of reasons. If you want to hear more extensive thoughts on AP classes, I recommend my episode titled “AP Classes and Why College Board is my Sworn Nemesis.” For now, all I’ll say is that while College Board had a limited time in a very strange world to create an online testing format that worked for everyone, they did it very, very poorly. Some people couldn’t submit their tests, while others experienced technical difficulties but were not permitted a retake attempt. I got through them without any problems, but I know that was not everybody’s experience.

Now, of course, online school is very different from the way it was in the spring. We have a regular daily schedule where our attendance is expected, and grades are given in much the same way that they were pre-pandemic. It is better in almost every way, but that still doesn’t exactly make it good.

As in many things, I’ve gotten lucky with online school. I’m fairly self-sufficient, and I mostly stopped procrastinating back in March when I decided that it was better to get it all done quickly than all of this confusing work looming overhead. I have a pretty regular daily and weekly schedule for myself, and I don’t typically let myself break that schedule, because I know that for me, no routine makes me a sad, sad person. I intentionally signed up for classes that I knew would be easy, or at least not hard for me, knowing that I wouldn’t want much of a challenge this year. I have a designated workspace, a desk I only use for school, and this podcast, but not for leisure time. If I want to play a game or watch a video, I’ll take the laptop somewhere else. It is in my bedroom, which is not ideal, but with four people in the house, our own bedrooms are the most regularly quiet areas.

There are still lots of problems, though. Well, maybe problems isn’t quite the right word. I’ll say challenges instead. There are a lot of challenges. Physically, it’s hard to sit at my desk all day. We have a little bit of time between classes, and I try to stretch, move, get water, do anything but sit in my desk chair during that time. It’s also just hard to sit still in one place all day, every day. At least at school, you’re getting up and walking between classes, being in slightly different environments. Now, it’s just me and my snake in my bedroom, and he’s usually sleeping in one of his caves during the day. The lack of sensory input is mind-numbing.

It’s also hard to stare at a screen for so long. I’m not going to jump into the Boomer argument that staring at screens makes you sad, I’m talking about your eyes. Two out of my four teachers have gotten those yellow-tinted glasses that filter out the blue light from your screen and make it easier on your eyes. One encourages us to take frequent breaks from our screens. The light can mess with your eyes, it can mess with your sleep, it’s just generally not ideal. But here we are. When your grades hinge on your ability to stare at a screen for 6 or 7 hours a day, there’s not a lot of room to fix this.

Some classes are really difficult to learn from in an online format. Like math, for example, or, I imagine, language classes. Some teachers have frequent technical difficulties, which isn’t necessarily their fault, but it’s a challenge nonetheless. In my Public Safety class, where we’re learning about firefighting and law enforcement, someone usually has to troubleshoot for my teacher, whether his microphone has cut out or he forgot to put a button to submit our assignments. In all classes, sometimes there are miscommunications, sometimes spotty internet, various difficulties getting into class or connecting to audio. On top of that, it’s really difficult to get teenagers to talk. I think? I’m not entirely sure. People don’t really talk in any of my classes, and I’m usually the only one with my video on. I think that varies between classes and teachers though. I bet that’s confusing for teachers. I know they don’t want to teach into the void, but what can they do? Relying on the empathy of high schoolers is risky business. Not saying they can’t do it, just saying that it’s unpredictable.

Recently, or maybe not, depending on when you’re listening to this, my school board voted to delay sending us back to in-person school until at least January. Will we go back in January? Only time will tell. We can’t accurately predict much of the future 7 days from now, much less 2 and a half months. Do I want to go back to school? Well, it’s a little complicated.

Do I want to be in school exactly the way it has always been? Yeah, kinda. That would be better than right now. But wasn’t that terrible in its own ways? Haven’t we now realized that maybe we should regularly have soap in all the bathrooms? And wear masks when we’re sick out of respect for others? And provide accommodations for the disabled community who have been advocating for remote resources for years but have been turned down because it wasn’t possible, and now we’ve all of a sudden discovered that it’s very, very possible? When students go back to in-person school, I want it to be a better normal. Unfortunately, I don’t think that a better normal is in the cards for me this semester, possibly not this school year at all. I don’t think we’ll be going back in January. First off, I don’t trust my peers to wear masks. I just don’t. Second, I know good and well that public schools are horrifically underfunded, and absolutely don’t have the resources to be checking everyone’s temperature and sanitizing everything and paying teachers for extra training. We don’t even have the resources to reliably have paper.

I don’t think we should go back to school. Yes, online school sucks, and yes, it sucks much worse for a lot of people than it does for me. It’ll suck to not have senior prom, it’ll suck to not have sports the way we want to have sports, it’ll suck to not have band or chorus or theater in the ways we want, and it’ll suck to maybe have a somewhat unorthodox graduation. But I think the bottom line is that it’s gonna suck a heck of a lot more when we go back to school and someone gets COVID, you know? Or brings it home to at-risk relatives. And in the long run, I don’t think those things really matter. We’re all told that high school is the most important four years of our lives, or if not high school, then college. But it isn’t, and these few years may suck and that’s okay. Someday, things will suck less.

I don’t currently have any say in the matter, being, you know, a child. All I can say is, to you, my friends, have compassion for the people who aren’t like you.

Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. You can follow me on Twitter @FastFactsPod, and feel free to tweet me any suggestions, ideas, or thoughts you have. This is Callie, signing off.