MY THOUGHTS ABOUT: Online Classes
Hey, you assumed I ain’t touching this series anymore? Well, plot twist! I’m back with this series. I was concentrating on my stories and reviews, so I had actually forgotten this. Besides, I didn’t have any topics to think about (totally no political issues to talk about) but TODAY I finally have a short one. It’s in the title.
Online classes. During this coronavirus period that has been occupying almost half of 2020, all the lessons are conducted at home through video-calling platforms such as Zoom, Skype, or Microsoft Teams. Now, they’re called online lessons. For me, I don’t like them. Maybe you do. I got my reasons, so hear me out.
It’s harder to understand. For me, I think I concentrate less when I’m at home, listening to my lecturers trying to teach me something. I feel the environment in my home is not conductive for teaching. I do not understand some of the things they are trying to teach. In realtime classes, I get to see some demonstration. Then, when I’m at home, looking at lecturers depicting an example, understanding is one thing. Their camera quality is another. Some of them are ungodly. Phew, it’d be a blessing if I could see them clearer. The theory part? I think that’s okay. Not so bad, but not good either.
Harder exams. When we’re all at home, studying, we are bound to look at books and notes during tests. Thus, the lecturers allow us to do so during this period, but they made the papers harder than before. Like wow, when I did the paper, I was stunned. When the lecturers told me and my classmates the papers are going to be a bit harder, I did not expect it to be THIS hard. Asking me to draw something that is out of the box is just ridiculous. It wastes my time, and it reduces the time I have for other questions. To make things worse, the exams are set in a website, and the papers can’t be backtracked! That forces you to do the first question and not attend to other questions first. Big bullshit in my opinion. Imagine doing an exam paper and you can’t backtrack. Maybe you skipped the first question, and halfway through the paper, you finally remembered the concept of the first question. You are ecstatic. Happy. Overjoyed. You can gain extra marks…but now, you can’t. Because you’re doing an online quiz or exam, skipping the question is as good as throwing your marks away in the dustbin as the lecturers laugh at you, calling you a loser. Online quizzes and exams can’t be backtracked, disadvantaging us students a lot. You can do that in a physical exam paper, so why not do the same to this? Lecturers claimed it will be the same as in classroom, but why is it not the same?
Well, there are also pros to this. I get to rest at home, which means I don’t have to wake up so early to go to my school through the busy public transport. I can do my writing at home too with much more privacy and time. During the breaks in between lessons, I found myself writing my story even more because now I can do it. And, I found a new anime series to binge watch.
Overall, is it all that bad? No. Yes, it might be mostly a piece of shit, but there are some good parts of it that helps us. I still rather physical classes, but it wouldn’t hurt to have some online classes sometimes.
