Opinion: How effective were the virtual days?

Going into the virtual day, I was very skeptical. While the idea of waking up later and doing all of my work in the comfort of my own home sounded great, I wasn’t sure how the whole day was actually going to play out. I also didn’t understand why we were having virtual day when we could just as easily come in for an actual day of school.

When I first heard about the virtual days, I remember thinking to myself, why should I do work at home when it is both beneficial and enjoyable for me to do it with my classmates in school? In my opinion, one of the best parts about going to a public school is the interaction that I am able to have every day with both the students and the faculty. Working from home, I was unable to do this.

As the number of assignments on my Canvas home page increased, I started to stress out. It seemed like I was getting more work for the virtual days than I would get on any regular block day. I had a math quiz and project, three history discussions, an English discussion, almost twenty minutes of computer science videos and a program to complete, and an exercise assignment for physical education. All of that had to be done by 3 p.m., and that’s not including the work that I had to complete for my other classes on Wednesday.

If all the work was not enough to leave me both tired and frustrated, the fact that the Canvas page was not working did not make the experience much better. It took me about an hour just to get Canvas to load and to view my assignments.

Submitting assignments was a nightmare, too. I thought that I was being smart by trying to open Canvas on a device other than my school laptop, but none of the devices that I tried were loading either. My Tuesday virtual day can basically be summed up by the “This webpage is not available” message. My alleged four hours of work took me over six hours to complete largely due to technical difficulties. I found out that I wasn’t the only one with this issue when I decided to reach out to some of my classmates.

The Wednesday virtual day ran a little bit smoother, one of the reasons being that Canvas began to work a little bit better than it had the previous day, although it was still much slower than usual. I was able to complete my work in a reasonable timeframe and prepare whatever work I needed to have done for class the next day.

My overall opinion of the virtual days is that they weren’t terrible. The first day was a nightmare, but once some of the technical bugs were worked out, virtual day ran pretty smoothly. However, although it worked out on the second day, I would prefer to only have regular school days in the future.