How Did E-learning Affect The Students of Central High School?

Due to frigid temperatures on Tuesday, January 16th, and Monday, January 22nd, the Champaign Unit 4 School District decided to have E-learning days across all of its schools. Cold weather advisories warned of ice on the ground, causing people to slip and cars to swerve out of control.

 However, on Monday, January 22nd, the school district sent an email about the E-learning day at 7:05 am, only twenty-five minutes before the doors of Central High School open for students.

Why was this a problem?

This created a problem because most parents were driving their kids to school and some students were already walking to school. After sending the email, the parents had to drive back home in dangerous conditions. This could cause an accident involving the ice on the roads and sidewalks. There are possible complications with some parents and their jobs messing up their schedule and their kids’ school schedule, especially iIf there is a stay-at-home parent.

 Having a small child at home can be very problematic depending on if they’re sleeping or not. “I guess some families with small children had it difficult. They didn’t have much time to plan for babysitting and maybe some had to stay home with them. Also, maybe some students didn’t have a good internet connection as well,” answered Ms. Del Rio Garcia, and this is a very reasonable answer involving the single parents part I talked about. It can be very problematic for single or stay-at-home parents if the parents aren’t home to watch theirt child, as the child could endanger themselves or worse, and sometimes babysitters aren’t available. Now, what I’m seeing from my point of view is that E-learning affects many people in multiple positive and negative ways. I don’t believe a lot of people had a problem with passing the time since they were at home instead of school, but some students probably hung out with their friends before going home. 

Ms. Del Rio Garcia said it wasn’t difficult for her. “It wasn’t difficult. I was working on preparing activities for the next day for my classes, I read a book, did some housework, and played table games with my family. I think this was a great way to pass time by spending time with family.” Which I’m sure a lot of people did,. Wwhether it be students or teachers. The Unit 4 School District should’ve tried to find out about the snow day problem before school started. Kikelomo Olukoya, who goes by Kike, felt a little angry, as while she wasn’t minding the fact it was E-learning, she wished they had informed us ahead of time like the night before. 

For Madame Navarette, she couldn’t have an E-learning lesson prepared, as she lives in Bloomington, Illinois it’s an hour away and Madame Navarrete is expected to have 2 lesson plans, 1 for E-learning and 1 for in-school. And I’m sure there were a lot of students that needed to be more focused in classes because they didn’t care about E-learning. They should’ve sent out the email earlier rather than sending the email 30 minutes before the doors opened at Central High School.

       I agree with Kike because I’m sure many teachers and students didn’t like that they had to get up early and go to work or school only to find out school was an E-learning day instead of an in-school day. The school district should have informed us the night before about a possible E-learning day. For Kike, she feels like E-learning is a great thing to have as you don’t have to stay in school for longer than you need to be. Also, she finds it boring pretty quickly. Since most of the time, you’re not doing much in online classes. She also doesn’t wanna go through that E-learning phase again in 2020 because of COVID-19. 

I’m sure teachers weren’t prepared for the sudden snow day and E-learning days so they had to change some lesson plans to fit with the E-learning days. Madame Navarrete had an in-school lesson made but since we had E-learning she didn’t have an E-learning lesson prepared. For teachers in the Unit 4 School District, this can cause schedule problems and lost class time.