School

This is more of a personal take on school at the moment. As of right now, I am a senior at Lick-Wilmerding High School. A very expensive school that granted me a spot, the only one from my school to enroll. Aside from my personal problems with the school is the bigger problem that I am not at school. I am home 24/7. I am not an indoor person and I absolutely dread not seeing my friends, not even during summer. I am about to head to college, probably out of the city, maybe even out of state, and I am spending my last year in the Bay at home cooped up on my computer doing endless work.

To let you know what I am doing I’ll give a brief summary of my daily routine. Monday comes around and I have 3 classes, I was not given the 4th class even though my efforts to get one. But it is hard enough to have 3 so I have no regrets. The reason 3 is so infinitely harder is that each class is 90 minutes long. A full 30 minutes longer than in school classes. I have class thankfully at 8:45 so I am not having to wake up at 8 every morning right into class on a screen. The extra time is enough but not the classes. I have so many problems with online classes. One I can’t ask any questions without the whole class breathing on my shoulder. Online classes are so bad with the curriculum, tests are useless, and classwork is non-existent. Instead, we get a ton of homework.

You always hear the complaints about homework and all the problems with it. I don’t mind homework not even when it was before COVID. But this is ridiculous when my classes are allotted 90 minute long homework assignments every night for every individual class. In total my whole day is 9 hours of work and lectures. Not good work mind you, repetitive things that barely get the concept in my brain. Lectures are good in mediation, but every class being downgraded to one person talking is extremely off. Especially when in class the teacher has no audience engagement and instead focused on reading a script instead of establishing student-teacher relationships to create a better learning environment. This is not it.

When I was in school before COVID it was 4 classes every day that rotated on blocks, every other day you had the same classes in a different order. But the next day would be another set of 3-4 classes that also rotated. So as a student I was given 2 nights to work on homework, now I am given only 1 night, every night. Granted I only have 3 classes and we get a Wednesday off. The problem isn’t that I have too much homework, but that each homework is individually made to take the longest time possible with only 1 day off in the middle.

This is a mild rant but I needed to explain my situation as well as get it out there of how school life has been degraded. I am at a school that asks for the same amount of tuition as some colleges but I am getting an education that is comparable to homeschooling.