eLearning day overall unproductive for students

On Tuesday, students were instructed to stay home for an eLearning day on Election Day Teachers were forced to go to school and partake in meetings. The idea was for students to have about 30 minutes of work to do for each class to keep them busy throughout the day, and then they would have the night off.

Though this was the goal, many students chose to get ahead on their work Monday night, or to simply not do their work at all. This resulted in many students being behind on work and having a day completely off of school. The exception was sophomores who were required to log on to Zoom to discuss their personal projects. 

For some, the issue may not have been on the students, but rather on their teachers’ ends. “My eLearning day was unproductive because I didn’t have much motivation to do the work and it wasn’t easy to access the work,” sophomore Chase Newton said. 

Students were receiving barely any grades for assignments, if any grades at all, and all of the assignments were going in the practice category which only accounts for 20 percent of their grade. Because of this, students could have done no work at all with little punishment. 

Some students simply chose to not do any work at all. “I would say my day was unproductive because I did all of my homework Monday night and didn’t do any work Tuesday,” senior Jeremiah Timberlake said. 

Realistically, this makes complete sense, because teachers opening their assignments the night before welcomes students to do their work the night before. 

Others took their e-learning day as a time to get some more sleep and relaxation. “I slept in, but after that I did some work so it was a little productive,” junior Carla Martinez said. 

Relaxation was a great way to spend the day for all students, even sophomores, because their designated zoom time was not until 1:10. This provided an opportunity for students to sleep in and spend the day doing whatever they wanted after a minimal amount of work. 

This e-learning day was spent not to provide education for students, but to better provide a day off without losing one of our 180 required days of school. The school needed the space for polls on Election Day, so the students got a day off. 

This is not the best way to do this. While having a day off is great, the way in which we are taking away a day of learning to simply have a day off is completely unnecessary.