Tower and Town, November 2020

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One Student's Experience Of Remote Learning

“Does anyone not understand?” That dreaded question... The crackle of unmuted mics ring out alongside the constant ping of class messages. A minute of radio silence fills headphones. Welcome to Microsoft Teams remote learning! It’s a waiting game, waiting until someone plucks up the courage to unmute the mic and speak. It’s awkward. Awkward in a sense that you know everyone is thinking the same thing, just waiting for someone to answer so we feel comfortable to raise our own question. The teacher forges on, speaking endlessly about a PowerPoint that appears fuzzy on screen whilst students try to get their attention so it can be sorted. 

All over the country kids are facing working in the controlled environment of their own homes awaiting the green light to return to school. For the past few weeks, after the initial excitement of working from home, I know that all I have been waiting for is the announcement of a return to school. 

By no means has remote learning been bad. Definitely not easy, but not bad. At first the change from a teacher and classmates to myself and my laptop was strange. Without the ability to chat to a friend beside myself or raise a hand to ask a question, all sense of ‘normalness’ had gone, dissipated, replaced with endless googling and searching through revision texts. The new normal is messaging friends on electronics, asking if anyone got the work set, or if they’d managed to work out what the work means. Being with just a laptop and its fluorescent glow is a change for us all, no matter what age. As the weeks have gone on, I started to get used to the new routine. That was until the Microsoft Teams meetings started… 

The meetings are generally helpful.  They give you back the opportunity to talk to others, teachers, and friends alike, it reminds you this is all part of something bigger. Of course, it did not originally occur to me that this ‘something bigger’ would require a disruption of my sleep schedule and the first proper outfit of lockdown. Granted, normal school started at 8.40am, but do not expect me to be awake enough to be on camera at half past nine these days!  Not only do we have to ensure that we are presentable for camera, we must wake up even earlier to make certain that the area we are filming in is ‘presentable and neat’! Another hard thing about lockdown has been online exams. The expectation that Year 10 and Year 12 would be able to complete a week of online exams with no IT meltdowns and the self-confidence to do our best was perhaps a taster of how GCSEs and A Levels in 2021 could be. Let's hope not. The first exam I did, I had to email the tech desk, maths support and my class teacher before I even saw my exam paper. Eventful? Yes. Desirable? I think not.  

 For many students, learning in lockdown has been a struggle. With the lack of resources remote learning provides, many feel at a loss how to get stuck into a set task. Simple tasks like taking notes from a PowerPoint have suddenly become monumental challenges causing a loss of motivation towards the work.. A motivation desperately needed when working from home. In a classroom we’d have a class discussion to cover any gaps in our note taking. This is now gone. The support we’ve grown accustomed to has dispersed. Some find it hard to decide how much time to take on a piece of work. I think this whole experience has shown how differently people work and learn. 

Home schooling has definitely been an adventure - an experience which I doubt many outside our generation will face for a long time. An adventure that we shall continue to plough through with the return of something like ‘normality’ in sight. The sooner we get back to school the better. 

Jude Anderson (year 10)