Online Learning: From a Student’s Perspective
Some people love it, some people hate it, welcome to the world of online learning, from a student’s perspective.
When you look up “online learning” on Google, what comes up are corporate art designs of computers as well as rows and rows of elementary school kids looking engaged at their screens, with studious-looking backgrounds, maybe in their living room, at a kitchen table, with books and plants next to them. What those image search results don’t show, is some sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated, high school or college kid behind on homework, disheveled and stressed out, sitting on their bed in a dark room with no lights on, and on the verge of crying for the 5th time that week.
I am painfully aware that most adults understand that school is hard, especially now, but it doesn’t really get drilled into their heads exactly how bad online learning is. I know this is the best that we can do right now, to still educate kids and get them prepared for the adult world, but I find myself wishing the day were over and saying “just get through this week” a little too often. This isn’t pessimism, being negative, or being overdramatic. This is the truth, this is what life is like for teens and young adults now.
Previous to COVID-19, I was an almost straight-A student, with only one class I was getting B’s in (math; my brain has a hate-hate relationship with numbers). I took all honors, AP, and dual-enrollment classes (and I still do, though with much greater difficulty maintaining good grades). I participated in extracurricular activities and had a good amount of friends from all the different clubs I was in. So more or less, I was on the right track to getting into a nice college if I kept up the good work.
At first, COVID seemed like a blessing in disguise. Everyone figured it would be over relatively quickly and that the cases wouldn’t increase too much. People were very careful, masking up and stocking up on hand sanitizer, soap, and toilet paper, social distancing, and in general, staying safe. I would actually get 7 or 8 hours of sleep, which I wouldn’t have gotten before the pandemic since I have a horrible sleep schedule and I often sleep less than 3 or 4 hours. The assignments were easy since all my teachers canceled the last few units of the year. We were not required to go on Google Meet or Zoom for our classes, meaning I could sleep in as long as I got my homework turned in on time. It was great, I was eating healthier, focusing on taking care of myself, exploring new interests and tv shows, and being a more social person.
But good things don’t last forever. We were only supposed to be closed for 2 weeks. One day I checked the school website and there was a notice in bold, saying that the school would be closed for the rest of the year. At first, I celebrated. This was great, there would be so much more time for doing things I enjoyed.
However, once May rolled around, my grades dropped. It wasn’t even a matter of a few points, like an A- going to a B+. I was failing the majority of my classes. The only ones I was passing were art, gym, and world history. I used to joke that I was failing a class when I got anything under an 85 but this was real, I was actually failing. At one point, my English grade went from a 98 to a 37. I didn’t have the motivation to do anything really, much less a bunch of classwork that was meaningless to me.
I can’t say for certain what caused this huge slump that lasted from May to July. (I nicknamed it “The Big Sad”). It’s most likely a mix of several factors, like the lack of socializing with friends, teachers suddenly assigning more work after local and state finals were canceled, and my tiredness of staying home all the time. My English teacher assigned a huge poetry project at the end of the year which I simply didn’t do until one of my friends told me to suck it up and do it to save my grade (this method of “get yourself together” doesn’t work for everyone but at that specific moment, that’s what I needed to hear). I turned it in over a month late and got a 65, just passing.
The only thing that saved me from failing my last quarter in 2020 was the fact that the school board decided to curve everyone’s grades. A 64–74 would become a 75, a 76–84 would be an 85, an 86–94 would be a 95, and anything above a 95 was automatically changed to a 100. I ended up passing all my classes, though getting a much lower score than I wanted in several of them. All these students, all these kids were being told to focus on school, school out of all things, in the midst of a deadly virus sweeping the planet. We were being told that it was going to be over soon and everything would be normal again. But it’s been a year, and it’s still not over.
Flash forward to the present, I’m sitting in bed typing this up at 1 am with 14 missing assignments, some are over a week old. Since 2020, we’ve shifted from asynchronous to synchronous learning, as well as developing a hybrid model where you physically go to school but also stay home on certain days. Every day has become repetitive for me. I wake up at 6:30 if I’m going to school in-person, and at 7:00 if I’m doing remote-learning that day. On remote days, I do my homework that is due the same day during gym, art, and my break, even though I’m not really supposed to. I am still in a lot of clubs, maybe a little too much, as it's kind of draining to go to school for 6 hours then go to a club meeting for another 30–45 minutes, zoning out the entire time and drowning out all the important information. Then I usually use my phone for several hours, as a coping mechanism to escape my current situation, only to realize 5 hours have passed and I need to start my homework and it’s already 8 pm, and as I have been missing a lot of homework, my grades have suffered and so has my GPA. This is something I’ve been trying to fix but repeatedly have failed to address.
It seems miraculous to me that some of my fellow classmates have actually been doing better because of the new system. Some of them go to sleep at 10 pm, whereas I usually sleep at 5 or 6 am, only getting an hour or two’s worth of rest. Some of them have near 100s, and their weighted averages are over 105. Some of them still find a way to play sports and be involved in clubs and win awards in the whirlwind of all this. I envy those people a lot. They are seemingly unaffected by the pressure of the new learning system, while I’m fracturing under it.
Of course, it would be silly to assume that those miracle-students aren’t affected by COVID. They’ve probably had real bad days too, where they forgot about an important test since they never saw the notification, or one of their family members got sick, or they’re experiencing serious burnout from a, particularly bad week. But seeing other people benefit from a situation you’re deteriorating from really goddamn hurts.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to achieve by writing this, maybe to stop the people who are going: “it’s not that bad”, “you should be grateful online school is easier than real school”, “stop being so stressed”, or “I’ve had it worse.” But in reality, I think I’m just trying to validate what I am feeling right now. I’m not lazy or bad at time management or just plain stupid, I’m a kid trying to survive a global pandemic, though not in the same way as someone sick in a hospital bed is. Let this serve as a reminder to be kind to those around you, especially high school and college students who are going through a once-in-a-lifetime, terrible, stressful, and downright horrible experience. We’re people too.