Hey everyone! I’m Back!
*Cricket Chirping*
I have more stories to tell on my blog!
*More Cricket Chirping*
...Huh, I guess social distancing isn’t just exclusive to the real world. Maybe I should just go back to my online classes.
*Even More Cricket Chirping*
Oh right. Well, I guess it’s back to watching daytime television.
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If you are in college like me (or have been doing literally anything virtual), you are probably well acquainted with this picture:
Yeah! Zoom University! It’s basically one global college and business. This brand is gonna be burned into our brains the same way Disney and Google have. It’s already worth more than the worlds largest commercial airlines.
By the time this blog is posted, most of my zoom classes for the Spring 2020 semester will have been completed. Granted I still have a bunch of projects and final exams that need to be finished. But no more classes, Hooray! Back to not seeing any new human faces for three months!
Online classes are not my cup of milk, as I’m sure most of you feel the same. I need to be in a physical learning environment practicing hands on work in order to learn. Sure, online learning works for little kid’s websites. But it’s a lot harder learning about the Silk Roads and integrals over the internet than it is figuring out what number comes after 4 (it’s 5, then 6, and 7...).
Even before this coronavirus pandemic presto-chango online courses mid-semester, I wasn’t very fond of online work. It’s way too easy for me to procrastinate. I took a couple of classes online during my senior year of high school and not a lot of learning took place in them.
The first one I took was AP Computer Science. Now my school doesn’t offer a ton of different AP courses to students to begin with, so this was definitely a good opportunity for me. I even used Canvas for it, got a head start in the main online tool that my college career depends upon.
The problem was that the course didn’t count towards my high school grade. Like, at all. There wasn’t even a period for it, I had to complete the work on my own time (and who wants to do that?). So my motivation was somewhat weakened by this lack of consequence. I got pretty far behind in the course. The teacher that proctored the course had a schedule of when we should complete chapters and assignments to stay on track. I was months behind where he thought I should be.
That didn’t stop him from constantly sending me emails urging that I do the work. This didn’t bode well with my parents either, knowing I was behind. I had three voices barking at me to stop procrastinating and do the work. I did it of course, I just needed a lot of encouragement from others.
Another issue I had with the course was how everything had to be completed in a specific sequence. You couldn’t skip ahead and read all the chapters, you have to do each assignment that comes with them before you move on. And this was before I became the programmer I am now, so I struggled with this. I guess that’s normal when you are first learning computer science (as I’m sure my friends that had to take a computer science course in college can attest to).
The second online course was AP Statistics. Statistics went a lot like computer science. I had online work with a teacher/proctor, I procrastinated, and had to scramble to complete stuff near the end. The difference was that this class did have a dedicated period to it. And my grade in the class counted against my high school GPA.
The class consisted of me and my best friend. And that was it. The teacher had another course when we were supposed to take it, so he sent us to the library where we were monitored by one of the workers there. She was nice, so we were okay with that.
My friend is the ultimate procrastinator. I’m talking about doing his assignments at the absolute last possible minute. One of my favorite stories (and my high school friends will agree) is when we had an English research paper over spring break that was due the morning we came back. He started the paper, at two in the morning, the night before. And somehow he earned a 100% on it. It’s almost magical what he can do sometimes.
What does this have to do with the story? Well his procrastination is very contagious. Especially when you are in a small room. We got off task every day at least once. Being the computer genius he was, he found a way to run a server at his house and bypass the blocked games on the computers.
We loved to play this game called Tank Trouble 2. It’s simple: two tanks are in a maze, shoot the other one down to win. That’s what most of our time was spent playing, especially when it came to breaking it. I think we learned more about how to perform glitches in that game than we did actual statistics.
That teacher eventually caught on to our laziness. Near the end of the year, we started to fall behind on the assignments. My friend more-so than me. The teacher had to keep getting rid of assignments that counted against our final grade just to keep us from failing. I remember trying to avoid him so he wouldn’t bring up our procrastinating ways. I think he may have been the only high school teacher that didn’t like me as a student.
So now we are back to this past semester, which moved to online halfway through. It was a pretty abrupt transition too. Monday we were all chilling in college life. Friday we were given the boot for the rest of the semester and had to move online. For a lot of people, these new online courses were a lot tougher to complete. If you are one of these people, I’m sorry. No one wanted any of this to happen.
I can’t speak personally about the pains of online college courses. Most of mine remained in equal difficulty, if not easier. One of the main reasons for this was because I had three labs that weren't hands-on (Two Computer Science’s and a Math). They all required programming on my computer. No test tubes, no physics junk, and no pipettes. Just a computer with Java, C, and *shudder* Mathematica installed. I don’t want to get too much into what my classes were about (in this post at least).
In fact, it may have been unfortunately better that classes were online. Being locked up in quarantine doesn’t give you much else to focus on. If I’m being honest though, I would much rather be distracted with campus life than focused in home life.
Like all other colleges in the nation, the University of Delaware used Zoom for class meetings. Most of mine met at regular times with a couple of exceptions. On the one had, it was nice getting extra sleep and waking up five minutes before class. On the other hand, walking five feet to get to class doesn’t do much to wake you up at eight in the morning.
So that’s how my spring semester ended. Absolutely not the way I wanted it to. As of now, the Fall semester is supposed to be somewhat back to in person. Who knows though, the coronavirus is unpredictable. I have a strong feeling we will be back on campus in the fall. I know it’s a leap of faith to say that but, well, you know how I feel about those.
Until we all meet again (which will hopefully not be over zoom), stay Mattastical!
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