Today is Tuesday, June 9th. In just 4 short days, it will be the day that marks 3 whole months of quarantine and distance learning. I vividly remember a conversation I had with my mom on March fourteenth, we were on our way to a Bulldog Rescue to pick up a dog that we ended up fostering and she promised me that during the two weeks that the schools were supposed to be shut down for, I would be allowed to hangout with my friends as long as we only hung out at each others houses and not in public so that we wouldn’t be exposed to strangers who could possibly have the virus. Well, that promise did not hold up very long. I got to see my friends on the fourteenth and the fifteenth but after that, I would not make contact with anyone except for family for a brutal ten weeks.

The first two weeks of quarantine, my school was still figuring out how to go about distance learning so I didn’t really have to worry about school during that time. On the third week, daily Google Meet calls began and we had work to be completed for each of our classes. I personally did not have the best experience with this, as I was spending almost the entirety of each day completing school work. I repeatedly thought to myself “We’re in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, why are my teachers assuming we have nothing else on our plates?” Luckily, as time went on some of my teachers realized that the work load was far too much so I wasn’t nearly as stressed as before, but I still spent about five hours on school work every week day.

It is now the final week of school and as the year comes to a close, I’m finishing up all of my final assignments and beginning to finally catch my breath. The past three months have been spent teaching myself material which should have been taught by my teachers in a classroom but due to the virus, that experience was taken away from us. I sit here and I find myself completely and utterly exhausted. Online school turns out to be a lot more work than regular school in a classroom. Although sometimes I found them annoying, I seemed to find our daily Google Meet calls quite helpful. These calls were the closest we were able to get to being in the classroom and I found it especially helpful when teachers would dedicate this time to teaching lessons and answering questions. On the other hand, I found most tests quite difficult. All of this new material was being thrown at me and it was hard to truly grasp it. My math class was especially hard, as I took Algebra 2/Trig this year and trying to learn Trig online was definitely not a fun experience. Although I understood the purpose, videos my teachers had sent out for us to watch didn’t quite help me too much along my distance learning journey. These videos were often very lengthy and I simply didn’t always have the time to sit down and watch through them before completing assignments. This is why I believe the majority of material should be taught through the zoom meetings and then any remaining material could be taught in short clips of videos which would be very easy for students to watch and understand.

Given the circumstances, most of my teachers did a good job of trying their best to keep things as normal as possible and trying to teach in the best way possible and I truly appreciate each and every one of my teachers and their efforts. In the fall, I hope to return to school normally but if that is not possible, I hope we can arrange going only a couple times a week and the rest being online. This way, we’ll at least get the partial experience and things can be easier because we will learn the material in a classroom. Distance learning has been hard, but I hope we’ve all learned from the experience and bettered our skills in this department.

*note: featured image by David Manning on Unsplash