The Woes of Online Learning

By Anna Kim ’24 and Ellie Ana Sperantsas ’24

After a long day of classes and clubs, exhausted students fumble open their laptops and head straight to Canvas. What do they find? A new assignment, posted with little to no prior notice and often not much time to complete. Bye, bye, evening plans. Here comes some unexpected chemistry. 

With remote learning, planning ahead seems more important than ever. For students in this time zone and especially students out of it, we need to know what our days look like so that we are able to fit everything in. With the rigor brought of an Exeter education, time management is an important skill, but how can we manage our time if we don’t know what we have to do? 

The Academy has tried to combat this by adding a new rule in the 2020-21 Student Guidebook—“A homework assignment should be given, at the latest, during the last class before the assignment is due.” But is that happening, given that we need the assurance now more than ever? Not always. Simply (and bluntly) put, more and better implementation of the policy is needed. 

For us students, the workload itself has been enough for us to worry about. The addition of online learning has presented many more challenges—there seem to be a million more things to keep track of, across multiple sectors of the online world. There is constantly a nagging thought: “What am I missing?” Realistically, students cannot keep up with the pace of remote learning without the ability to see into the future with weekly plans set out by, at the latest, the Sunday before a week begins. And similarly, students cannot juggle the extra demands of an online environment without knowing their homework in advance.

We acknowledge that from a teacher’s perspective, it is also tough. They are essentially picking up two jobs: teaching and managing the online realm, all while supporting their students. The pandemic certainly has not been easy for them either, and we recognize that. We know that they are also learning how to teach online, and that it is no easy task for anyone. 

However, having teachers post their plan and homework in advance would have no negative consequences for them either. In fact, it helps all parties know and plan for the upcoming week. And it is also vitally important from an equity standpoint — remote students studying from different time zones have to constantly switch between two time zones, school and home. They need some degree of forewarning to pull it off. 

It’s obvious that the online format has created a great imbalance in week-to-week workloads and a greater need for planning ahead. If our teachers had uniform and enforced policies for notifying plans to students in advance, it would ease a bit of the stress we all carry. Teachers and students alike would know what’s ahead.

We are also both students currently studying on-campus, so our perspective is somewhat limited. That said, we reiterate our belief that this need for looking into the future would be even greater for students studying off-campus. Keeping track of the class schedule from a different time zone is stressful enough, but adding an inconsistent homework policy between classes must make it all the worse. More than us, they need this. To that end, we hope both that the Academy will enforce and that teachers will uphold school policy on posting homework and class plans. 

Why is it that students are expected to complete their work on time, but that too often, faculty don’t adhere to the Guidebook? It’s a real issue—many of our teachers do not post weekly plans or follow the rules put out in the Student Guidebook, and it’s caused unneeded stress in an already crazy time. 

We are not playing the blame game—it is so hard to be a teacher right now, and we hear that. We just ask for support from the Academy and its faculty as all of us, teachers included, are continuously navigating the virtual classroom.