As the school year is ending, the big question that teachers and administrators have is did online learing work. My answer: absolutlely not. Online learning for me and for many others that I know has been all in all, pretty trash. There are a mulititude of reasons for why it is so bad, but the main one for me is the lack of motovation that exists in completely online courses. Due to the lack of interaction with teachers and other students, I found it very hard to get engaged in the content being taught and even harder to get the will to do most of the assignments. It became overwhelmingly obvious that I would never voluntarily do a complete set of online courses ever again in my life. For the first time in my life, I missed going to school. Not only did I miss the interactions that I had with people, but I also much prefered face to face learing in comparison to online learing based on what I just said.

Another major reason as to why distance learing did not work for me was the lack of intersting content/concepts. Many teachers just don’t know how to teach if they don’t have a class in front of them and aren’t adept at using technology. I mean, I thought learning chemistry in class was boring, but online, it was absolutely mindnumbing. I don’t think I have been so lost reading out of a textbook trying to learn something with half of the words in the book just going right over my head. When I had to do something like this, my brain would almost immediatly say, “Aw we can save this for later, I would rather do something else. Lets go into…”

Which is exactly what I did. Most of the material that was given out simply wasn’t interesting enough to keep my attention, which is the core problem with distance learning. Teachers that are good at teaching face to face usually have a way to make the material that they are teaching us less boring and easier to comprehend, which in turn makes it easier for students to pay attention and understand what it is that we are supposed to be learning and why it is important.

I could handle having only one online class, I even enjoyed it. The free time that it opened up for me was invaluable and I loved having the one class, but only one of them. Having to self discipline for all five of my classes was just not something I enjoyed at all or even did well at. Sure, I am ending up with good grades in most of my classes and a good number on the report card, but throughout the last 3 months, I feel as though I haven’t learned anything. I still have a math final to do, and I don’t remember what we did two weeks ago, much less what we did at the beginning of the semester. School is supposed to be about learning, but I can’t possibly see myself learning anything if we had to undergo this experiment again. I am not quite sure what the solution should be to learning with coronavirus still around, but I do know that it would be in the schools best interests to not have total online learning like it has had in the past few months.