By Estefani Dujardin, staff writer
When I first heard that we were going to begin distance learning after spring break last year I didn’t know how to feel about that. I imagined that school was going to be easier because the workload would be less & teachers couldn’t give such difficult assignments. And I was right when we first started. I enjoyed getting to sleep in and having a shorter schedule compared to when I went in person, but after all these months of distance learning, I realized that it will never give me the satisfaction of in-person learning. I realize that I took in-person school for granted.
I can’t even begin to explain how online learning isn’t all that. A consistent problem I have is that for certain subjects I have to set more time aside because I had to start teaching myself things in order to keep up with what we were learning whether it was through Youtube videos or from my older brother. And it doesn’t help that my teachers are assigning me a hefty amount of assignments to do, which just adds to the stress that I have from distance learning.
But that’s not even the biggest problem that I have with distance learning. Because over time I’ve begun to feel disconnected from my friends. While at school I got the chance to be in the classroom with my friends and pass them in the hallways. Distance learning essentially strips away the humanity and interactions I used to have on a day to day basis. The only thing that I still didn’t like was that I wasn’t able to connect with friends on zoom, I was often put into awkward situations in the breakout rooms because I didn’t know the people in there personally.
While distance learning certainly has its perks, overall distance learning isn’t the thing for me. It’s left me feeling down and overall disconnected from the communities I’m a part of. I may have been one of those people to complain about how school is boring and I don’t like going, but I realize I took school for granted and now I really miss going to school and being able to interact with my friends, teammates, and my teachers.
