During first few months of distance learning, classes struggle to find balance in schedule

Junior Maurice Holmes, who transferred from Kenwood Academy to U-High this school year, said three of his classes, chemistry, math and English, abruptly ended when distance learning began last year. 

Because of his lighter classload, Maurice said he was relieved to have more time to do work for his other classes and glad to have more free time.

Kenwood Academy senior Sam Libenson said that some of his classes stopped having synchronous teaching, and instead assigned exclusively asynchronous work.

There were many possible reasons for the quality of classes decreasing, including but not limited to issues with accessing Wi-Fi and technology, the standards being lowered to guarantee an equal education for all students and other obstacles the pandemic brought.

Some other classes would meet synchronously through Google Meet, but only to register attendance. This meant that students would join calls for their attendance without any actual instruction.

Kenwood Academy senior Angelina Divine said that in her film studies class, where she and classmates were nearing the end of their final project, students only showed up for their attendance because no one was able to go outside to film, halting class instruction.

“I mean it sounds so wrong… Click this Google Meet link, get your attendance and leave. That was it,” Angelina said. “Sometimes we would just stop coming in and so you came to class, like five people who maybe get their attendance. It was like, does this even matter?”

Like Maurice, Sam was relieved that his schoolwork lightened. His only concern was whether he was prepared for AP testing but said he found online resources from the College Board to study for the subject tests on his own.

Angelina said she felt unprepared coming in for AP testing.

“It was very hard being a student who kind of excels to go into this exam with no real training, no real idea of how to carry any information from the month I spent inside into the exam was just a lot,” Angelina said.

While some classes decreased their course loads drastically, some teachers tried to uphold the level of learning from a normal year. According to Angelina, it was difficult to balance processing the pandemic and the workload that these teachers assigned.

“Some teachers were overly motivated,” Angelina said, “and I’m still processing a pandemic and you want me to just jump right back into school, which was hard.”

On top of this, when Kenwood Academy students first began distance learning with Google Meet, they utilized the same standard schedule they had during in-person classes. Because of this, many students found school days hard to manage because of their tight schedules.

“Everyone was super unprepared for what was happening so there was no time for the school system and then Kenwood to create a solid schedule,” Sam said.

In September 2019, prior to the pandemic, the Chicago Teachers Union also had also been on strike for 11 days, making it even more difficult for teachers to have prepared for the switch.

“I think just the energy of the school year, with the strike and the pandemic we were all, we just gave up. And it’s sad to say like you gave up on learning for that year,” Angelina said.

The grading system was modified by Chicago Public Schools so that students could not receive grades lower than the ones from their third quarter before the start of distance learning.