In March of last year, the MHS campus closed suddenly, plunging students into days full of Zoom classes and online assignments. As weeks of distance learning stretched into months, students became accustomed to testing from home, doing activities in breakout rooms, and communicating through the Zoom chat. Some students transitioned easily, while others struggled. The Union interviewed several students on their perspectives regarding distance learning after a year.
Through a Zoom interview, junior Ianna Carreon revealed her struggles with distance learning. A major one for her is motivation. She said that it is hard to resist distractions, even though she keeps her Zoom window on full screen to help avoid the temptation.
“It would have been great if the school provided more ways to increase motivation,” Carreon said. “You could maybe give students a journal that they could use to write down their goals and check in on themselves—just creative ways to help students that are not online.”
These academic challenges hindered her transition to junior year, Carreon said. When students started online learning in March last year, many of Carreon’s classes lost their rigor and structure, she said. Carreon said that she struggled to adjust to the increased difficulty of distance learning at the start of this school year, especially since her junior year course load is much heavier. Although she eventually adjusted to the pace, she dislikes learning asynchronously in particular, she said. She can watch a video as often as she needs to grasp the material, but she can not ask questions or clarify anything in the moment, which intensifies her fixation on problems that she doesn’t understand, Carreon elaborated.
Carreon’s challenges with distance learning have not been limited to academics either, as she also emphasized the repercussions on her mental and physical health. “I haven’t been eating properly,” Carreon said. “Because of the homework that I have to do, or the lack of sleep that I had the night before, I would much rather use break time to either take a nap or do homework. Eating and exercise have been the least of my priorities because everything’s just so difficult to juggle… And this has probably been the hardest year for me, mental health-wise… My confidence in my capabilities as a person and as a student have been very low. A lot of people don’t understand how difficult this is because you just see me sitting at my desk all day.”
To alleviate the burnout from distance learning, Carreon said that her parents have been urging her to get out of her room so that she can breathe and take care of herself. Every Friday, right after class, she is so eager to spend time offline that she immediately leaves her workspace with a book or a pencil and a piece of paper, she said.
“FaceTime calls, any calls with family or friends, felt like homework to me because the line that defines your leisure time and school is blurred,” Carreon said. “I stopped responding to a lot of text messages because any notification I got could have been a bad test grade or an assignment due the next day that I haven’t started. Emails each day bury emails from yesterday, and it’s just so exhausting. So not only did [distance learning] take a toll on my responsibility and motivation as a student, but it also took a toll on my personal life.”
Junior Sarahjeet Dosanjh said that distance learning also presented many challenges for her. “I prefer in person learning just because of how disconnected I felt from my peers and teachers this past year,” Dosanjh said in a Zoom interview. “Classes have become really repetitive and uninteresting and lonely. I don’t feel like I’m actually present in school.”
Additionally, Dosanjh said that she would see a lot of deadlines on Google Classroom, and it was difficult for her to space out the work because she could no longer complete some of it during lunch or class at school. It became more tempting to push all of the work to the last day, she said. Dosanjh added that since she is a visual learner, she could not grasp concepts as quickly as she normally could.
“You attend your classes in the same room that you sleep in and do nothing in, and from the chair that you also slack off in,” Dosanjh said. “It’s really hard to sit down and be like, ‘Okay, I need to start doing my homework, even though I do virtually everything else in this room as well.’”
However, Dosanjh said that she was more academically successful in a virtual environment. She explained that the lack of structure forced her to adapt and change her study habits, as she was able to develop plans, schedules, and self-discipline tactics. It was also easier for her to ask questions through the chat feature, she added.
“Overall, I think the most important thing I learned was how much I really value teachers who care about their students,” Dosanjh said. “To the teachers that handled the challenges [of distance learning] while respecting the students and keeping their situations in mind, thank you so much… Going into my senior year, I’ll definitely appreciate those teachers more and show them how much I care about that as well.”
Freshman Jeslyn Nguyen said in a Zoom interview that at the end of her eighth grade year, she hated distance learning because she thought that it was more work and that she missed the physical aspect of being in a classroom. However, since she developed organizational skills, like creating a schedule, prior to the pandemic, she was able to adjust, Nguyen said.
“In some aspects, it was easier [to transition from middle school to online high school],” Nguyen said. “The high school campus is really big, [and I didn’t have to figure out where my classes were this year]. The vibe of high school hasn’t kicked in because you’re not in the high school. But it’s also harder because there are completely new teachers, new people to deal with, new connections to build.”
Nguyen added that as a whole, online school is fine, except for her precalculus honors class. She said that she felt the schedules for her other classes were well-adjusted to online learning, but for math, there is more work due to the amount of content that students have to cover in one year.
“There are protests happening, and social issues,” Nguyen said. “The world is kind of on fire. And we’re out here worrying about whether negative 30 degrees is equal to 330 degrees on the unit circle… I don’t think school should be a priority when there’s a pandemic.”
