Online School Experiences and Hardships

For the past two and a half years, I’ve been taking online classes, along with a few other students. There have been ups and downs, but honestly more downs than ups. It was really hard to get started with the new workloads, as it is very different from the regular in person classes.

In the first year, when everything was just first going fully remote and being set up; it was very complicated and unclear about what the work was supposed to be. There were no classes to attend virtually, just work given out. It was very difficult to adjust to for teachers and parents, but especially for students.

The next year, we had the option to either take online classes through Woodstock or VHS. I chose VHS, but it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. There were no classes through VHS to attend; it was basically an independent study kind of thing.

At first it was a lot to take in. The first few weeks of it were really light when it came to the workload. But, as it started getting later into the course, the workload started getting heavier. I was still just adjusting to this, so I was really caught off guard by it.

A light workload was probably about an hour or two of work a day depending on the class. But as it got heavier, it was probably closer to 6-7 hours of work a day on various classes. We had 4 or 5 classes each semester and each one took different amounts of time.

For example, my math class probably took about 1-2 hours a day, which was a normal middle school class. Then one of my other classes, horror writing, probably took around 5-6 hours a day, but this class was a high school honors class. The nice thing about it was that you could work on it whenever you wanted; you could take breaks whenever you wanted, get a snack, and just relax.

Luckily, I wasn’t the only one taking VHS classes that year. My friend Rue Stahl was also in the same classes that I was in. We got to work on a lot of the work together, which made it a lot easier for both of us.

Now, Rue and I are the only fully remote students attending Woodstock in 9th grade.

“My online experience has been pretty good so far. I like how little homework they give. Also, for some reason, high school is a lot less stressful than middle school,” Rue says. I agree with him for the most part.

Unfortunately, Zoom has been quite an issue for us so far. The connection between Woodstock and our homes is really spotty and bad, making for a very bad Zoom experience. It cuts out a lot and makes it very hard to get anything done in class.

It usually disconnects anywhere from 5 to 20 times in a school day. Every time it reconnects it also happens to be muted, so until someone notices, we can’t actually hear anything that’s going on in the classroom. We generally miss around half the audio of the classes each day. Whenever it disconnects, me and Rue have a counter to keep track of the time.

There was one time I was right about to present a presentation and the Zoom call disconnected so someone had the time to go before I did! In group projects and presentations, we’re literally just a computer sitting on a desk providing audio and video of ourselves to contribute in whatever way we can.

Some of the teachers try to move us around the classroom when each student is speaking so we can actually hear them. Occasionally when we’re moved around, the internet cuts out in certain areas and then we disconnect and it’s once again muted until someone notices. As you can probably imagine, this makes it difficult for us to actually get any learning done.

Then, after we disconnect so many times, we don’t know what’s going on in the class, so we either have to email the teachers every time we don’t understand something because of the Zoom issues, or we have to call out and ask. This is very time consuming because often the teachers don’t respond right away because they’re teaching a class or don’t hear us calling out to them.

It’s also hard to participate in class as you would in person. We don’t currently have a good way to raise our hands to ask a question or give an answer; we’re basically just asked to call out generally. “It’s hard to share your opinions and answers to a class through a screen,” Rue says. We both share the same concern on this.

We would be going to in person classes by now, but the risks of COVID-19 are too big for us to take. I have Crohn’s disease, and the medicine I’m on that keeps me alive shuts down my immune system, leaving me with next to no protection against the virus. For people like me, the vaccine doesn’t actually give any protection.

“Besides the obvious fact I have asthma, I live with my grandparents and my sister just had a baby, so I don’t want to give them the virus,” Rue says. So we both really can’t come into school for different reasons, but it’s all the same when it comes to the choice between life or death.

There are a few nice things about remote schooling, though. I get to wake up a lot later than I normally would, I can relax and work at more of my own pace, plus I can stay in pajama pants! I also get to be with my cat all the time which is really nice.

“I’m not a morning person, so I get to choose my own schedule for when I eat and wake up,” Rue says. He also has a few reasons to like the online schooling, but we would both still prefer in person.

I’ve been in quarantine since COVID-19 started, which was about 2 and a half years ago. Rue and I have both been attending remote classes since. Not being able to have the social interaction of middle school and high school is really hard for us, but we make due with what we have access to.

“Probably like almost every weekend I go see my friends,” Rue says. Of course they social distance and wear masks, even while both vaccinated.

I can’t take that risk though. I generally just play video games with my friends online and don’t really see anyone in person. It’s been really hard to live like that, but it’s how it has to be for now until more people get the vaccine.

Ultimately, Rue and I are just waiting for herd immunity so we can return to in person school. The faster that happens, the better it will be for us and the teachers. We encourage you to get vaccinated so the world can be a safer place for people like us.