Virtual Learning Solves
What if this is just the answer to all that’s wrong with school?
Last year, students often obscured their faces on their lanyards, to the dismay of teachers and administrators. Now, teachers are thankful for any sign of a student’s face at all.
Although the pandemic has stunted students’ mental health, social skills, and academic performance, several problems teachers and administrators would be running into during a normal semester have been significantly reduced.
For one, it has made it drastically easier for students to reduce stress and unwind.
“It’s been a lot easier to focus,” an anonymous junior said. “It’s so much easier to focus on the important things, like TikTok, when you’re not constantly trying to hide your phone under a desk or something and then arguing about it with your teacher.”
In addition, students have found that anxiety levels have significantly decreased.
Whereas students previously had to be careful during Socratics for fear of interrupting someone who was still talking, students can now watch for “mute” displays on Zoom disappearing. Voila. Time to talk.
It also helps because you don’t have to worry about who you’re sitting next to on Zoom.
“Yeah, I don’t know what half of my classmates look like now. Sometimes that makes it difficult to talk, but at the end of the day, I find it hard to care since they’re pretty much strangers to me,” sophomore Mary Sue said.
“Plus, it allows me to ignore people easily. I can just make up excuses if I don’t want to talk to someone whereas I can’t always control who I’m going to be sitting with at school.”
With everything being online and virtual, factoring out transportation time has given students the necessary hours to sleep like never before–indeed, many students are taking full advantage of the opportunity and sleeping right through their class.
And there are built-in excuses in virtual learning that are more credible than “the dog ate my homework.”
“It’s so much easier to come up with excuses for skipping,” Sue said. “Wifi issues are just one of the many reasons I could be missing my Zoom session. I don’t have to worry about oversleeping anymore since I can just email my teacher later on and say I had technology issues.”
It’s easier for teachers, too. Now, when students misbehave, they don’t have to see it.
My name is Wenbo Fan and this is my fourth year on Lamplighter. Since starting Lamplighter freshman year, I’ve learned that journalism can change the...
