Its been one full semester of online school for me and hundreds of thousands of other students around the world. With being stuck at home all day staring a computer screen with teachers who seemingly drone on and on and on, our lives have changed tremendously.
One thing I know for sure, is that our attention span has exponentially declined. This can be for many reasons. Our generation (gen z) as a whole have spend hours on end on tiktok each week. TikTok's short 15 to 60 second videos decreased our attention span as we are only able to focus on videos of that length. School also tends to have boring subjects and/or boring teachers which many of us struggle to pay attention to (i promise i pay attention mom and dad).
Online school is also a completely different feel from regular in person school. Many students (not me but many) feel as though school work is optional. Assignments that would've been given even if things were normal, all feel optional. As, if we do them, we do that from the comfort of our own home.
Teaching styles have also drastically changed for us online kids. We have had to get used to doing everything online. Every single assignment has been given, turned in, and graded online. We have even done drawing assignments and other unique assignments online (easier said than done). Teachers have their lessons only on plain powerpoint slides that challenge us kinesthetic from grasping the content. It's also very difficult to reach teachers. Apart from our regular daily 50 minute class, in which most teachers rarely check the chat, we can contact our teachers through Schoology messages, in which they ignore or don't check. Our last resort is the classic formal email, which can take from hours to weeks for a response. Luckily for me, my teachers and professors have replied to my emails somewhat quickly, but it will never be the same as walking up to your teacher at any given time in the day to ask them something.
However, I do truly feel for the teachers. Many of them don't have the luxury of teaching from the safety of their own home. Even when teaching from home, they've had to get used to all the online ways of modern school. They went from printing thousands of assignments of paper to uploading a PDF. They've had to get used to or even learn how to use zoom. They've had to struggle with hybrid classes and going back and forth between their in-person students and their Zoom students at the same time. Though some still forget to share their screens, some more often than others, I'm very thankful for the amount of effort they have all been putting in for our education.
Nevertheless, our teachers have been assigning more homework than ever. As a highschool junior, this may just me being an upperclassmen in difficult classes. But, I have heard the same from plenty of students of a lower grade and students taking easier classes. I'm not sure if this is intentional, or if it is to make sure we are paying attention, or if it's because they think we have nothing better to do after school. Yet everyday, I'm stuck staring at my screen for hours on end, in school, then, after school, I'm stuck staring at my screen trying to complete the truck-load of homework assignments I collected throughout the day.
Because of being home all day, many people in our generation (including myself) have lost vital social skills. Our only social interactions consist of over-the-phone conversations. Now, when we go in public or in any place with lots of people and potential in-real-life conversations, we tend to panic. I can only speak for myself in this case, but as a whole I've noticed that most of my fellow online classmates experience some form of anxiety when faced with a social situation.
During this pandemic, I feel as though friends have been a tough topic for us all. I feel like we have all lost at least 1-2 friends during the pandemic because of lack of communication or simply because you aren't interested in being their friend. We discovered the true difference of a school-only friend and a friend that you'd hang out with outside of school. We ended up only keeping in touch with the outside of school friends (the real ones)and many of us solidified our friend groups as we realized everyone else were just school-friends. Being an online student, I've lost many friends throughout the pandemic and this past semester. Again, because I'm an online student, I haven't been able to meet new people at school and make new friends either. I'm not hugely affected by it since I still have my set of friends, but I still feel an impact as I don't feel as known among others and don't have more people to discuss life and hang out with.
From even before the start of the new school year, we all knew that many students would cheat to get their work done faster and correctly. While many students have high grades from only cheating in their classes and putting little to no effort in, many honest students are struggling to keep their grades up. There is not much any of us can do to prevent or stop cheating, other than to not on cheat assignments ourselves.
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hey everyone! i hope yall liked this blog post! i spent a lot of time and effort on it because it's a very important topic for me and during this time in general. i feel more people should know more about how us students feel about online school and how its affecting us. this post has been the longest so far!! and im very proud of that. i wrote over 900 words and this post is around a 4 minute read when normally my posts are 1-2 mins. thanks for reading!
- dhriti