My journey through online school during quarantine has been a difficult one. As a person who needs to be in a classroom to keep my routine in line or I lose myself in what I’m doing, I procrastinate a lot. Doing online school can make it harder for me to get up and do work. Sometimes I want to skip a day of class and just rest. Even if I have gotten better about it, I still have those moments of hesitation that make my life harder. 

When in a classroom, I can talk to my teacher before and after class and at the end of the day if they’re available, which makes communicating with them so much smoother than writing a long, drawn-out email explaining the difficulties I’ve had with an assignment. 

Some online classes don’t allow for a group discussion, and that makes communicating with a teacher about something important more difficult than it should be. When in-class, I can give feedback on how to make the topic we’re learning about more interesting, and the teachers can change their methods to help us understand better. However, online learning doesn’t have that communication opportunity, so the teachers have no idea if what we’re learning about is helping students understand. It makes it more difficult for me if I do not understand what we’re learning. So

The way we can make it easier is just going back to school. Online education was given to us so abruptly, so we didn’t have time to plan how to communicate through Schoology. COVID-19 is the reason school is online, but I still think even in this pandemic, learning should be in person because most of us have never experienced online learning before, so it throws off our normal routines.

Even though it hasn’t been easy, I’ve found a way to make online school work, and while I do miss being in a classroom, getting an interactive education to help me understand the work, I’m doing better daily.

Learning experiences, especially now, are different for everyone because they’re dealing with their own things at home. Education can work one way for one person and another way for a different person. It really just depends on how they learn best and what their preference is for their education.