A High School Student Reflects on Online Learning

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon

We’re excited to share a very special guest article by Beckett Glass, a local high school student. Beckett not only shares the experience of online learning from a student’s perspective, but outlines changes being made by teachers and support staff as well.

I am a student at San Lorenzo Valley High School, one of millions of students like myself who have been forced into remote learning by the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Teachers and students alike have had to adapt to new technologies for learning. In the classroom, many teachers could easily teach concepts that they may find difficult to teach online, and the same goes for students who could easily learn those concepts taught to them in-person in the classroom. We all now have to adapt to the difficulty of learning from their home. 

My math teacher has had to do much more to adapt to this new world of teaching. Even more so than most, because before the outbreak, he had to go through the ordeal of chemotherapy while teaching math at the same time. Now he has to do the same, but with online learning. 

There are other challenges for teachers in these times. In a classroom, a teacher could easily have a sit-down with a student who was misbehaving or not participating in class. Some teachers have more difficulty than others. For example, my mom, who is a sixth-grade Resource Specialist, has to replicate the support of the classroom for children with disabilities. Remote learning makes it harder to help teach and maintain their focus in class. 

(Read NPR’s take on teaching during COVID-19 with interviews from teachers all across the country.) 

Learning On-Screen 

For some students, it is harder to focus while they're at home with so many distractions around them. And if they are home alone, they have to exercise initiative and focus of their own accord. Some schools are changing schedules to help students focus. For example, my school, SLVHS, is changing the schedule so we are only in classes from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. On Mondays, we do not have any academic classes, but we have “supporting” classes such as Career and College Counseling. This improvement in schedule allows students to minimize our screen time.

Zoom (despite its possible security risks) is both a blessing and a curse. It can be positive because it is good to interact with people who are not members of your direct family and it is helpful for visual learners. But it can be negative as well, because it adds more time on a screen, especially if you finish your work early. Digital learning also presents the temptation to look at your phone during class.

Benefits of Being Home: Family Time

One of the more positive aspects of distance learning, for me, at least, is that I have been able to bond to my brother far more than I could have if I had to still report to school in the mornings.

If I still had to attend a physical school, I would be leaving just as he was waking up. I would not be able to spend as much time with him during what we have dubbed “Brother Time.” We play Minecraft or Dungeon & Dragons together, and just recently started watching Gravity Falls together, a show that stopped airing around February 2016 (so, we’re a bit late to the party). The shelter-in-place has presented an opportunity for me and my brother to bond, and through the gloom of the shadow of pandemic, we have grown to be much closer.

Distance learning has presented many challenges for students and teachers alike and has impacted everyone, but it has also helped people come together more, in a way that was not possible during a normal school schedule.

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Beckett Glass
San Lorenzo Valley High School, class of 2023