eLearning is failing me. Literally. 

This entire year I have worked extremely hard to maintain good averages. I have done it and I can proudly say that I have done it honestly. But now because of eLearning, I worry that all my hard work may have been in vain. 

I have several gripes with eLearning. Most of them, however, I understand cannot be remedied given the circumstances and so I will not bother complaining. As I write this piece and go about my daily life, I keep in mind that we are all simply doing our best amidst this mess and that we all need to be given appropriate consideration. 

eLearning, for one, is the rushed product of an exhausted system. The people at the head of our district are working fervently on many fronts. They are fighting to make sure we have everything from food to WiFi; the essentials, the things we need to live. And on top of all that they are working even harder to ensure we have education. We’re not getting it as we deserve it, though. 

Given the time frame, budget, and other limited resources, there’s little anyone can blame them for. Like I said, we as students are doing our best and they as administrators are doing theirs. That’s what I think they need to better understand.

Even though we’re all “just kids,” this whole ordeal has made us grow up a lot. Juniors are all essentially all seniors now and seniors are essentially all graduates now. We’ve lost out on a lot. A lot of memories and lessons, but most importantly in the eyes of the district: we’ve lost out on a lot of knowledge. 

As I said before, it is virtually impossible to give us all the education we deserve in these dire times. Even without a global pandemic, school, and life for that matter, is tough. Among us we have parents who have jobs, parents who unfortunately don’t, siblings who need to be taken care of, grandparents who we need to savor our time with, and much much more that the rest of us could never know.

School is hard as is, but I plead to the school district and to the entire school staff not to make it any harder. While I don’t think pass-fail is the best course of action, I definitely think we students deserve a break. I’m not asking for a free 100, just some understanding (this is not to understate the amount of consideration I and my peers have gotten from our teachers- we really do appreciate it and it genuinely can make our day).

While we lack in-class lessons, this could ironically serve as a valuable life lesson. It could either be a lesson about how life is difficult and you just need to just pick yourself up and move on, or a lesson about how life is difficult but it can be made infinitely less difficult if we just work to understand each other a little bit better. Which lesson we learn is, as always, up to the school board.