The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has caused the president to issue a stay at home policy, schools to close, and nonessential workers to work from home. 

Now essential items such as toilet paper and disinfecting products are scarce and have limits when you buy them. All students across the United States, whether they are in college or elementary school, have to start online school and adjust to it because schools are being closed for a month or the rest of the school year. Many people are losing jobs due to a lack of business. 

Ever since schools have closed students have heavily relied on the teachers for any updates about school and work needed to be done for the rest of the school year. From experience, I feel that this new online school system used by HISD specifically is very ineffective for students to learn something new. For me personally, it’s hard to focus when I’m not in the usual learning environment and although I like how spread out the due dates for assignments are, I still believe online school is an ineffective way of teaching and aiding students to learn.

As of right now, approximately 7.1 million students are taking online learning courses. Most of these students are being forced to do so because the coronavirus outbreak caused schools to close a  month and even the rest of the school year. 

This new online school system we use is causing teachers to give us what I feel is “busy work.” Our work consists of reading textbooks, powerpoints, or instructions given by the teacher and writing answers to questions or creating projects over what we read or previously learned. I feel this is causing students to simply look up answers online and copy-paste, which isn’t showing the student’s understanding of the subject.

Students at home who aren’t directly impacted by the virus are probably zooming through homework considering they are giving us weekly due dates. This fast working pace isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but are students understanding the content they are being given or just looking up answers online?

On the other hand, not every student can’t easily finish their school assignments because of their home environment. There can be distractions such as siblings, parents calling their child to do something else, and other responsibilities the student has at home. Some students also can’t concentrate on their work with loud noise and sometimes that can’t be controllable with small children. 

For me personally, I get easily distracted with loud noises from my other siblings and my parents constantly call me to do things every day. I keep having to pause what I’m doing and forget where I was at or what I had already read because I have other responsibilities to take care of first. 

I feel as though if teachers would give us less “busy work” and more effective work that will help us fully understand a concept, students will be able to understand what they are learning.