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Writer's pictureEmma Nguyen

Is Online Learning Effective?

If you told me a year ago that there would be a pandemic causing hundreds of deaths and nationwide self quarantine orders, I wouldn’t believe you. Before this quarantine, I didn’t realize how much COVID-19 would affect my life. To be honest, I thought it would be something like the Ebola outbreak, deadly but able to be contained and controlled quickly. But, this virus ended up reaching the US and spreading at very fast rates, to the point where businesses had to close and events had to be cancelled. But on a smaller scale, my personal life has been affected by quarantine. My social life, my diet, and my mentality have changed. My social life has all moved to my computer and my phone. My friends and I have a “quarantine support” group chat and we have a Zoom call and a game pretty much every night. This helps because it made the shift from seeing them in school every day to not being able to physically interact with them more bearable. My diet has also changed. Because I am home more and I have a kitchen with food, every two seconds it feels like I’m going in there to grab a snack or a drink. This has made me feel so much worse about my body because I don’t even get that much exercise. Lastly, my mentality has definitely changed. I’ve learned to cherish more things in life and know that things could happen where everything goes away.

Online learning, in my opinion, is helpful to some extent. I really think that we got lucky in terms of education when this outbreak happened because most curriculums were close to finishing, which leaves less confusion when having to learn the material on your own. Adding on, with the new AP exam modifications, there’s not as much pressure to do learn difficult material. But, in the beginning, it was definitely very difficult. At school, you learn in class but don’t necessarily have homework for every single class. With online learning though, everything feels like homework. You’re learning by yourself, doing classwork and homework at home by yourself. This just makes me feel more overwhelmed with the amount of work. Adding on, every single class had to assign something in order to keep their students engaged. This makes it so much harder to keep in track of everything. But, it seems that most of the actual learning I have to do in my classes is over (because AP’s are coming soon). Hopefully, I’ll get more used to this online learning in order to push through the next two months in quarantine.


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