By Adarsh Burela and Evelyn Fu
For the 2019-2020 school year, there will be no finals that will be weighted heavily, Principal Francis Rojas said. Teachers can still assign an assignment in place of a final during the closing activities occurring over the week of May 24- 2020, which will be the last week of instruction this school year, Rojas said.
From May 27 to May 29, there will be a schedule similar to finals week where teachers have two hours for activities such as final presentations or a simple check-in, Rojas said. Teachers may also assign makeup assignments to help students get credit for the semester, Rojas added.
“Some AP teachers said, ‘part of our preparation for AP was to give a final, can I still give a final?’” Rojas said in an interview over google meet, “You can still give the final but it shouldn’t determine a student not getting the credit if that’s the only reason why they’re going to get credit…It’s just a closure activity. It’s just some way to say, hey classes are over.”
Attempting to teach in an online environment has proven to be especially difficult given the amount of time to prepare, English Teacher Annie Shine said in an email interview. The work assigned to students needed not to not only be unique but it also had to maximize the amount of learning in a fraction of the time she would have had otherwise, Shine said.
“My classes are almost all discussion-based and I don’t usually believe in homework, so I have had to create an enormous amount of curriculum in a short period of time. This challenge has been exacerbated by the fact that I teach five different classes, so I can’t reuse my materials,” Shine said. “While creating this curriculum, I really tried to be intentional about not just making busywork, but instead walking my students through only the most essential information and exercises to maximize learning and minimize stress/work.”
By assigning an end of the year assessment, teachers are able to assess where a student is at, World History Teacher Danilo Escobar said in an email. With online learning, knowing if students did the work for assigned work is also difficult with only a few ways to check for academic honesty, Escobar added. Regarding the closing activities, he plans to give an exit survey to receive feedback from student’s experiences with distance learning, he said.
“I would personally not want to ever teach in an online manner again. A lot of teaching comes from personal relationships you build with students, and online learning does not facilitate the growth of these relationships,” Escobar said. “For those of you that pushed yourself to keep learning, that demonstrates excellent character. Keep it up!”
Freshman Natalie Chen’s teachers still plan to hold finals, Chen said through text. Although having the traditional finals may negatively affect her grade, she would have liked having finals to review everything she has learned over the past year, Chen added.
“What I as a student found difficult about this situation is having assignments open during certain times. If my WiFi was slow, then I would not be able to take the test with the total time given, which makes it difficult to get 100%,” Chen said. “I managed to adjust to distanced learning by setting schedules for myself. I wanted to be able to maintain even a little bit of normalcy so that when school starts again I will be able to fall back into my old study habits.”
There is a lot for the school to learn from the shelter in place experience, most of which can be applied to the years to come, said Math Teacher Annie Nguyen over an email interview. Taking care of the students for next year’s distance learning should be a priority Nguyen said.
“I believe that MHS did a good job getting prepared for school closure as much as possible, Nguyen said. However, we need to be there for students who don’t have the internet and get them ready for distance learning again next year.” “[Next year] should be a hybrid classroom where I would teach in person and record it. I would then upload it for students who are not there in person.”
Overall, the change due to shelter in place has led to nothing but downsides, Senior Norman An said through text. Though they get their education in a much more inefficient manner, students at MHS are generally not taking it too seriously, An said.
“I think canceling finals is fine. Finals usually bump down people’s grades, and with it being a pass or fail I don’t think anyone is complaining,” An said. “Online classes are really bad in my opinion. My work ethic since quarantine is really bad. Online classes are a school without all the good parts about school.”
Though teachers have been lenient with grading and due dates, there were still finals for AP Calculus BC to practice for the AP exam, Junior Lynn Nguyen said through text. Assigning online finals gives students an opportunity to cheat by collaborating with friends as well as use the internet Nguyen said. By giving online finals, students may also be distracted by their family, Nguyen said.
“An online final just won’t show an accurate representation of our knowledge,” L. Nguyen said. “I still take my education as seriously as I did before. If a final was given, I’m confident that the majority of my grades would be boosted.”
