Students disappointed over unproductive eLearning day; teachers look on the bright side

After school on a cold Tuesday in January, students await a text from the administration telling them that school has been canceled.

At around 6 p.m, students and parents get that text. The only downside is that instead of school being canceled, they are informed that they will be needing to log onto zoom the following day, starting at 10 a.m.

While many students spent the day logging on to Zoom and doing classwork, others decided to spend the day either not logging on, or just not taking their Zooms and work seriously.

In students’ defense, it does bring back a lot of memories from logging onto Zoom every single day and attending school virtually for months, something that was hated among nearly everyone. This, however, should not have been an excuse to not attend classes and pay attention.

Class periods were 38 minutes long, and most teachers didn’t even force students to stay on for the entire time. This means that it was essentially a free day for students. While an eLearning day is not ideal, at least students didn’t have to stay on for 50 minutes every single period.

“Personally I didn’t like the Zoom classes. It was a bit unmotivating and boring,” senior Miko Puno said.

eLearning is certainly not ideal in terms of entertainment. Unfortunately, there is little the teachers can do to fix this, as they obviously would rather be in school, or just have the snow day off completely just as much as students would.

“We should have just done assignments, it was kind of a waste of time to go on Zoom,” sophomore Casey Schumacher said.

Having an asynchronous day like we have had two other times this year could have been another option. Unfortunately, a new law has been passed that says we can only have three of those a year, which have already been scheduled (wfyi.org).

“I would have had a two hour delay or just come to school,” freshman Eythan Smith said.

Due to the fact that there was only two to three inches of snow on the ground, a delay or just a regular snow day could have very easily been executed. Unfortunately, since school was canceled before it even snowed, school could not take place Wednesday.

While students were upset with the eLearning day, teachers attempted to look on the bright side of things.

“I thought that mostly students were productive. I would say mostly students who do not do their homework didn’t do their homework, and students who do, did,” French teacher Jill Thrasher-Reid said.

While the eLearning day certainly was not ideal for teachers, it was only one day, so they can at least appreciate the efforts of the administrators to make it so that we don’t have to make up the day later in the year.

Obviously no one likes eLearning, but it was certainly a pretty relaxing day. We had barely any class time and the workload was light compared to most regular school days.

Most likely this won’t happen again this year, but maybe next time this does happen, administration should wait until they know for a fact that it will be difficult for students to get to school instead of assuming that it will be impossible.