The New Virtual Learning is Half and Half -Stephen Matus

 This school year so far in September is an entirely new experience. It has its pros and cons and I'm gonna express both sides that I currently believe in so far this school year. I will start with the pros of virtual learning. One of my favorite parts of this new schedule is the time we start, which is 8:00 AM. It gives busy people extra time to sleep in. My next pro is focused on the education portion of this new learning experience. I believe that some teachers have been doing better with these classes than others but overall it is working out as I've been learning just fine. My final pro is that we have only four classes a day. This gives the students an extra day to get ahead on any projects or homework which is a huge relief. Now to move onto the cons, even with all the good, I would say there are many problems. I'm gonna begin with the length of the classes. Each class lasts sixty-five minutes. From the two weeks of doing this, both my classmates and teachers have been experiencing multiple issues with this. Since the classes are longer, it can be tiring for the students but also hard for the teachers to assign enough work to fill all sixty-five minutes. My next con includes technical issues. Both teachers and students can experience the following but not limited to: lagging, freezing, getting kicked, tabs loading endlessly, buffering, etc. With most people attending the meets on a Chromebook, this causes lag through the entire google system, slowing down the class. For my final and most important con, it would be how the elective classes work. Let's say you're like me and are taking electives that require you to be together as a class for them to work. You are definitely not getting the full experience and knowledge taking these classes online. I'll give two examples, my first being band. The definition of a band, in music terms, is a group of instruments that play together. Right now during virtual we don't do this because of the limits to google meet. My second example is Graphic Design. This is a class you need to learn using the necessary programs. But little to no people taking this class have Photoshop at home. Instead, we use a simplified online website called Photopia which only displays the basic parts to Photoshop. But what if this website didn't exist. How would the students learn this class and what work would they be doing? Even with all this said, I do know that it's easier said than done. With all the challenges going around with COVID-19, its make these sort of tasks difficult for the school. Right now cases are increasing among students, which is scary but we can all hope it dies down by the time of November.