By Katherine Lee, Co-Editor-in-Chief
Familiar faces in the hallways, lunch with friends and sitting in actual classrooms — it’s good to be back in the building with a relatively normal school year before us.
However, I would be lying if I said that there weren’t more than a few things that I miss from the days of virtual learning.
Trying to wake up before 7 a.m. every day, I am nostalgic for the mornings when we would be able to just roll out of bed before class and simply click into a Teams meeting for the first block of the day. Breakfast, too, was far more feasible during virtual school. Whereas now I am resorting to scarfing down apple slices on the ride to school, there was more than enough time to fit in an actual meal during the 20-minute time frame for homeroom last year.
The lack of traffic is another aspect that I miss about virtual school. On the rides both to school and back home, I’m often stuck in the middle of long lines of cars that transform a six-minute drive to 20, sometimes 30, minutes of being trapped in traffic. With the school now allowing us to enter the building at 7:15 a.m., I’ll admit that this problem has, to an extent, alleviated; however, I’ve found that traffic still remains an issue, especially as it gets closer to 7:50 a.m.
In addition to the road congestion, traffic extends to within the hallways of the building. When school was simply a matter of clicking into the next meeting, there was no having to deal with the crowded hallways between classes. Sometimes, there’s a human wall of students, especially around the staircases, that makes it seem like you’re barely even moving.
In terms of classwork, I miss all of the assessments being open-note. Although it probably was not the best for our learning and retention, it certainly reduced the stress around tests and quizzes. On the other hand, I am glad to take tests on paper again, especially for math and science classes, rather than the virtual puzzle piece assessments on Schoology.
While I greatly appreciate the reduced screen time of in-person school, the technology of virtual learning did have perks, the most convenient being the ability to screenshot the whiteboard or presentation during lectures. This made it so much easier to capture what the teacher was writing so that I could fill in the notes afterwards if I was falling behind.
Additionally, while it’s great to have the human interaction and social aspect of school back this year, it goes without saying that the feeling of safety was more present in virtual learning.
And so, as grateful as I’m sure we all are to leave the virtual days behind us, we shouldn’t immediately write it off as a year gone to waste. I think we could all agree that even with all its bumps, virtual learning was nevertheless an experience filled with good moments that, at the very least, taught us not to take anything for granted.
Katherine Lee can be reached at [email protected].
