On March 13th, 2020, it was announced that Virginia schools would be going online for the rest of the year due to the global pandemic. At the start of this semester, it was decided to go online for the first quarter and we still don’t know if we are going to go back this year. Having all virtual classes is the hardest way to learn. Many students are confused or not learning anything. Most students are just submitting anything and don’t care about getting bad grades. Many students get distracted from zoom, especially because they have 4 classes a day with only a 10-minute break in between each class. Some students are just submitting assignments and getting grades without learning anything. 

I interviewed a Charlottesville High School Senior, Sahil Rahimzai, and asked him How he felt about zoom classes. He responded with “ I don’t feel good about it,  I am not learning anything, I am trying to focus but everything around me is distracting.” He also said, “ Since the first day of school anything we learn doesn’t stay in my mind at all.” Another question I have asked him is how his grades are. He answered with“I am trying to do most of my work but it’s all too much if I am not learning anything from zoom. How am I supposed to do my work?” He also said, “Some teachers aren’t understanding that we are in the middle of a pandemic, and do not realize how much work they put on us. Sahil Rahimzai is a senior who wishes to have his last year of school as easy as it was for other seniors in the past years. At the beginning of school, he was doing fine, but with a lot of teachers assigning a lot of work, he started to fall behind. Because of this, he decided to drop some of his classes and take some easier ones. He also said, “ There are some awesome teachers as well who understand that we are doing our best and appreciate our hard work on assignments.” 

Another student I have interviewed is Laila Sheikh Abdul Salam, who is a junior at Charlottesville High School. I asked her how school was going. She replied “It is tiring, there is much work to keep up with, especially that we are at home and we have other responsibilities to do, and a lot of distraction happens at home. Laila also has been asked, if she is focusing on zoom classes. She responded with “No, it gets boring sitting four hours without a long break, students get bored and sleepy.” The Last question she was asked did you turn your camera on or do you think when you turn it on your rate of focusing increase, she responded with, “No, I don’t turn it because most of the students don’t, and  I feel uncomfortable turning it on.” She also said “Teachers should understand that we also have eight other classes to worry about, and I also have to do chores, all that makes it hard to have time for myself. I feel like I’m not learning anything. I’m just doing assignments to keep my grades up.”

In closing, even though we have online learning for our safety and benefits I think there should be some ways to make online learning easier for us. Maybe instead of meeting twice a week, we can meet once a week with a longer time period. This will help both the students and the teacher as well, giving teachers more time to grade assignments faster. Also, teachers shouldn’t give students many assignments that take more than an hour to do, because most students feel that these assignments are useless and they are not learning anything from the assignment nor the live zoom. Some students believe that they will learn better if the live zoom time was longer and less independent work.