I’m going to take a moment to complain about school. If you don’t want to hear about it, you don’t have to read it.
As you know, I’m still in high school. (I’m a senior, which means I’m almost done, though.) My school is taking advantage of these modern times. We have a 1 on 1 netbook deal, where every student has a school-issued netbook. This year, the school initiated a new program – the e-learning day.
Here are the rules of an e-learning day.
- Every student must sign in be 09:00(EST/EDT), or he/she will be counted late.
- Every class must assign 40 minutes worth of work.
- If students need help, they can e-mail their teachers between 09:00 and 13:00.
- All students are expected to have all necessary resources.
And much, much more!
Basically, if there’s a snow day, you sign on, see your work, and do it. There is no new material, just review and that kind of thing. The idea is that if you do as much work as you do in school anyway, snow days can be counted as time in class so we don’t have to make up the lost days.
Well.
On January 7th, we had a snow day. Commence e-learning. The site where we are supposed to log in is not up and running yet, so we get to sleep in. My work load turned out to be not much at all – about 40 minutes total, not 40 minutes per class. So, I did half of it, went with my brother and some friends on a trip to Cincinnati (the roads weren’t actually that bad), came home, and did some more.
On January 8th, we had ANOTHER snow day. This is where things get bulbous. See, the system was designed so that if a day was missed, the day was used just for review, so when we come back the next day, the class can just continue without doing any of the review in class, thus saving class time. However, we were out TWO days in a row. That means two consecutive days of “review,” and class will be behind anyway. Do you know what that means? About six hours of busy work. Sure, the Econ work just went ahead to the next section like it’s not supposed to, and same with calculus. But all the other teachers tried to scramble whatever they had left over from the current section, the results of which would have been comical juxtaposed with the assignments from the previous day, had they not been more frustrating instead. For instance – the work on January 7th for English class was to research Charles Dickens so that we can discuss what we found with the class the next day. That’s easy enough, just search “Charles Dickens,” click the first non-Wikipedia link, peruse the page, and you’re good! January 8th: write a 1 to 2 page paper on Charles Dickens based on your research.
It’s not that I can’t write a 2 page paper. For that matter, I once overshot a 1 page assignment by 2 pages, when everyone else had trouble filling just 1 page. The problem is, this stuff takes time. I know that’s what they were going for, but today’s work is an order of magnitude longer than yesterday’s!
The thing that irks me the most is that it’s called an e-learning day. It’s review! That’s not learning anything new! It’s just e-doing! And for that matter, the vast majority of the work wasn’t even on the computer, it’s just a “doing” day.
On the face of it, I’m down with doing some extra work on snow days if it means school doesn’t drag on longer. The problem is, it’s hardly productive work that we’re doing. It’s just busy work. This is the kind of stuff that delays Electric forever. Busy work. I enjoy learning as long as I’m actually learning.
I know that this is the wrong place to say this, but there has to be a better way. I ended up doing more work today than I do in a normal school day, with an average amount of work. If I’m giving up that kind of time from everything else, the trade-off better be good. Like I said, it was for Econ and Calc. That was it, though.
…Wow. So. If you actually read that entire novel about me complaining about homework, you’ve just earned 10 points. Don’t worry, I’ll talk about something more interesting next week. I just needed to blow off some steam.
RD’s probably going to take this post down. I’d be okay with that, I just needed to rant.