Online Learning

 

So during my blog posting hiatus from November 2020 -> September 2021 was literally my entire sophomore year. Sophomore year was super special, and I should write a post about what it was like ASAP as my memory of it is already kind of lost.

Online Learning Format

The schedule was super nice.

Monday, Thursday = 1st, 3rd, 5th. All classes were 70 minutes long with a 10 minute break in between. This would from 8:00 - 12:20 where literally school was over.

Tuesday, Friday = 2nd, 4th, 6th periods. Same time frames.

Wednesday = ACCESS day. Access was at 9:45 AM I think where we had to log-on to our assigned access teacher and watch announcements on AVTV. Afterwards most people just left, some people would ask for help from other teachers during this time. I basically viewed Wednesday as a day off from school honestly.

So this was crazy. Essentially, for each class there were two lessons each week. Normally it's supposed to be four.  

This format ensued for both semesters. I think quarter 4, they developed a hybrid program which started letting some kids in-person again with super strict guidelines. Only like 10% of the school or something actually went in-person. In my English class no one went in-person, in my history class there were like 2, in my band class there were around like 6 or something. In Spanish there were like 3 kids, in AP calc there were 2 kids. 

Honestly going in-person is just more of a hassle. You have to wake up earlier to go to school in-person and you dont have the luxury of literally doing whatever you want as opposed to online. 

Classes

1st period Wind Ensemble II

I wish I remember how this class operated. It's hard to do band online. We were all videos on with mic off. We started off each class where the teacher posted a question and everyone answered in the zoom chat. After, we did some breathing gym where I turned my video off and basically continued coding lm*o. I rarely took out my instrument during band. 

After, I think he would do some exercise like 4 F's or something idk. Some type of warm-up, maybe rhythm stuff.

Then we would like try to rehearse? I sometimes participated. All the music was handed out on google classroom. Sometimes this meant we did like full runs, other times we logged off and went on bandlab.com or something to try to record a piece together using software. Idk, it was all super scuffed. Must have sucked more being the teacher lol. 

I actually remember that a lot of the time in 1st semester online, we were split into brass + percussion and woodwinds. We would log on for the first 35 minutes and then the woodwinds would log on for the last 35 minutes. It was pretty nice being released from class early.

Second semester when people went in-person, the rehearsing seemed better. The conductors would like just conduct the in-person kids and the online kids would just play along.

2nd period AP CSA

My second period was AP CS with Mr. Kiyoi. This class was also very scuffed. I didn't need to pay attention and I didn't. When I did, I realized how horrible of a teacher Mr. Kiyoi was. Like you can just tell this man is not confident and did not prepare what hes teaching lm*o.

We would boot up every class by making us send jokes in the zoom chat. The jokes were part of a specific theme such as "Halloween-spirited jokes" or "school-related jokes" or you get what I mean. Afterwards he would call on us to say our joke where literally no one laughed. 

Lots of classtime was spent in breakout rooms doing an assignment together or whatever. Kiyoi had a big problem with breakout rooms. Literally every time after a breakout room session he would announce that no one had their cameras on and that we need to be collaborative. As this progressed he started threatening things like "you will get a 0 on the assignment" or other types of things if he walked in and the breakout room was dead silent. Honestly it's tough for the teachers, I don't know how else they could enforce it. So yeah it kinda worked.

We had tests like semi-biweekly? This meant mics off and he put problems on a Google Doc and we had to write down our answers on a sheet of paper. We then scanned and submitted our hand-written code on google classroom. A couple of times we did group tests where he shuffled us into random breakout rooms and we submitted a google form as a group. 

The final for sem1 I remember. The dude gave us a repl link and shoved us into breakout rooms so he could vibe. We had to build parts of an UNO game and yeah that was rly it.

The other APCS teacher was better and assigned more work. I believe both teachers didn't prepare us for the AP test well enough. There were so many prominent topics that we didn't go over. 

I literally remember during 2nd semester he would give us a video from "Brocode" about "Javaswing" or something where we learned absolutely nothing. He assigned this like 2x a week and we had to write down the source code from the video and submitted it. Absolutely useless. No one in the class remembers it and I have no clue what the incentive was to assign that type of work. It's completely unrelated to APCS. I started not watching the video after the 5th time he assigned it. 

Mr. Kiyoi just gave me that type of vibe that he wasn't a good teacher. He just seemed so questionable about everything he taught and the javaswing homework he assigned was evident that he didn't know what he was doing. His curriculum was unorganized and he reminds me a lot of my Spanish teacher in middleschool. 

3rd period Honors World History

There are three levels of Sophomore history in my school: Regular/Honors/AP World History. I chose the middle track because I don't like history but also because I don't want vape kids in my class. 

My history teacher was great. She was Mrs. Battilega and you could tell she didn't like online learning but yet she was still so enthusiastic. Just a great teacher and even more of a great person. 

However, she assigned too much homework for Honors World History. There were notes like once or twice a week or hyperdocs we had to fill out and there were DBQ or SAQ assessments very common(around two times a week). I hated these. I just remember this class having a lot of work to do outside of class as there were a lot of projects too. I barely got away with an A first semester. It was a borderline before the final.

During class, we were met with activities such as Socratic Seminars, debates, lectures with like activities she would give us. 

Some projects I can remember doing was a group one where we had a google slides and every slide was a topic relating to the history unit we're learning. We have to choose a song for each topic and explain how it relates/represents the topic. We then presented our slides to the class.

Another one was one where we had to write an animation/comic-book for some unit. This was a group project. Another one was preparing for a debate or something. The biggest one was the the project for the WWII unit where we had to write like 10 paragraphs or something, representing the research we did. After, we had to make some sort of project that uses the research. I made like a 7 minute video about my project. Other people made a posterboard about their topic or some sort of huge visual representation such as the battlefield in the war or some type of scenery or something idk. Most of the projects were done on posterboards I think.

So yeah overall I don't really have much to say. I literally forgot everything I learned. There were lots of memories in this class; it was online learning where I became addicted to coding. I coded a lot with unconventional "coding buddy" Isaac and learned a lot with him. He was in my history class. We were on binarysearch rooms reacting to her comments or doing problems on bsio. Aside from the tests, it was a fairly enjoyable class. 

4th period AP Calculus BC

I was with Mrs. James, the hardest one. She was quite crazy. Her knowledge is very profound, shes a nice teacher, and she assigns a lot of homework. Lots of times it was 40-50 questions for homework. This could be done in 2 hours if it was efficient. I learned a lot on how to focus and manage my time with the courseload that AP Calculus gave me. 

I remember she would still assign her crazy amounts of homework after we took a test. Like we literally finish a unit and she assigns homework that basically previews into the next unit. I was very upset with that. Other than those CPM problems, we would work on circuit worksheets, review worksheets, or AP sets which were targeted practice/review for each unit. AP sets didn't take that long to be honest.

Compared to the other two BC teachers, she assigned the most. I compared the assignments with other classrooms and saw literally a 200% difference. There were times where the 10 page review worksheet she gave us wasn't even assigned in the other classes. Not only that but the tests for Mrs. James were harder too and had a dramatic difference in terms of test averages. I was stuck in the mid-B zone on the tests scores a lot of the time. The two teachers had different grading policies. The other teacher didn't assign unfinished classwork as homework.

Overall, getting this class over with is something I don't regret. Having this privilege is so insane in my junior year. Mrs. James' homework prep'd us very well for the AP test. I would say that literally 90% of the class got a 5 on the AP exam. She gave us so much homework that it was impossible to not have the concepts down. 

We would begin the lesson with her lecture that went over the concepts. She would then put us into breakout rooms with our groups where we would work on the classwork together. These groups would be changed after every unit. Sometimes we had a desmos activity added on as the classwork. We would call her into the breakout room if we had a problem we couldn't figure out as a group. If we didn't finish the classwork, it was homework. This was by far the class that I paid attention to the most. I never went on binarysearch or checked my messages during this class.

We would have a group test and then an individual test to wrap up a unit. These occurred like once every two weeks? I forgot. 

I remember our AP test was like a week before school ended and she timed it so that we took the final before the AP test. Basically, we had nothing to do after we took the AP test. School was basically over during 4th period. We would talk about the AP test and the other time we played trivia. It was so fun and honestly just relaxing to finally have this 4th period where I can chill. To me, Calculus wasn't "hard," it was just time consuming and exhausting. Since I skipped precalculus into this, I was also doubting myself, but honestly lots of the self-studying I did for precalculus wasn't needed for calculus. There were many times where I was confused over some concepts and I went in her classroom during access which was very very very very very very very helpful. Very helpful.

5th period Honors Sophomore English

This class with Mr. Pagtakhan had a very steady routine. We were assigned a section of a book to read and during class we would discuss the book. He rewarded points for participation which turned this class into a game of points. People started answering questions with literally nothing to contribute and there were many "sweats" in the class that really got on my nerves. Sometimes I really wanted to say something and he would pick on them instead of me. Either way, I did learn a lot about just life in general. What it means to have a purpose and why we should step out of our comfort zones. Something that has really stuck with me is this. The worst thing someone can commit is betrayal. Cheating someone is the weakest, most ignorant, and at heart is the least amount of empathy one can show. I totally agree with this. Betrayal is worse than fraud, it's worse than violence, it's worse than torture, greed, addiction, self-centeredness, etc. Loyalty is absolutely key. I literally love it.

After reading a book, we would basically write an essay analyzing the book. Writing the essay was pretty time consuming and Pagtakhan graded pretty harshly so we had to really put our full effort into these essays. These essay scores would basically determine our final grade as it was heavily weighted.

6th period Spanish III

First Semester

Mrs. Carpenter taught this class. 

Let's just get straight to it. This class was an absolute mess. I hate to be critical but it was a sh**show. The first hour of class was spent doing her yoga lesson or a 40 minute mindful meditation video. She was a yoga teacher so she was super passionate about this stuff. We spent absolutely no time learning anything in class and I don't even remember if tests existed. I don't know how she managed to put anything in the gradebook. What did we even do? 

There were probably assignments we had to do or verbal quizzes we had to take but I do not remember doing them. I remember that we were on module 2B towards the end of this semester. For reference, we were supposed to be on 5B or something. That's less than HALFWAY through the curriculum. An absolute pathetic effort from the teacher. No one knew what we were doing in the class. She was fired after this semester.

If she had a twitter account, I'm the type of guy to reply to her tweet with "jobless + ratio + you fell off" and not feel bad about it. I'm sure she went back to teaching yoga after she became unemployed. 

Second Semester

Mrs. Warner wasn't playing around. She introduced us to a new concept: learning. By actually assigning meaningful work, there was an actual motivation in the class. I still didn't really pay attention, but Mrs. Warner was a good teacher. I mean it's her first year at this job so like most teachers, I would expect, would sacrifice the most in their first year. 

For once we were assigned a project. Then tests that we actually had to take the time out of our day to study for. It was incredible. We had to work for an A in this class.

The most memorable thing about this class was the Final. I spent a long time studying for this cumulative final. Like a long time. I had a 89.4 percent or something in the class and I wasn't willing to live with that. I actually learned things in Spanish and I remember I worked really hard to study for this test and I delivered. I remember that the questions on the test were exactly the type of questions I studied. 

Thank you Mrs. Warner for actually teaching a class. 

Marching Band

Marching band was online this year and I played Mellophone. We had to attend zoom meetings twice a week. One of them was a sectional and the other one was like a full group rehearsal thing where I literally turned my video off.

The sectional was pretty cool. My section leaders were pretty nice. We were tested on the show music one time.

The full group rehearsal thing was basically something where I opened the zoom meeting and pretend that I wasn't in a zoom meeting. That's what most people did anyway. It honestly sucks that the seniors didn't get their proper final marching season. We didn't get the Winter banquet, Senior speeches, WBA championsh- literally any competition at all -.

Clubs

Clubs were all online too of course. Most of them were super low quality zoom meetings and you can't really blame them. I remember I raided the web dev club with my friends and spammed the chat and renamed ourselves or something. That was pretty fun. Yea honestly clubs in general just fell off when it went online. 

_______________________________________

Well, that's all I remember. I should've made this post earlier but whatever. I may have some inaccurate details just because of memory loss. IDK. 

Overall, I benefited a lot from online school. Since school ended at 12, I developed a consistent workout routine and had lots of time to code. I spent quite a long time coding during this period, that's why the blog was dead. One time I did 81 questions in one day, that was pretty legendary. The rest of the time was devoted to Calculus.

So yeah, that was pretty much my life during online learning summed up. 

:D

Lyric(s) of the Post: Even though we're miles apart

I knew it right from the start
That I'm not leaving without you
Said I'm not leaving without you

Gravity, don't run away from me

Gravity - Laszlo