As we start off a new year here in Illinois, it’s certain that we’ve been greeted with something that would’ve been more merry a month ago – snow.
And we got quite a bit of it a few weeks ago… on Friday it was pretty much snowing all day! However, that didn’t stop the school day, as we had to relive the days of 2020-2021 by doing eLearning. This happened on both Friday, January 12 and Tuesday, January 16, as the cold temperatures stopped us from doing school in person.
But do we really have to do it? Can’t we just have a good old snow day? I got it when the virus was spreading around almost 4 years ago, but should we really do it now? Let’s see the pros and cons…
PROS: We won’t have to make up any days during summer break. Sure, this is pretty nice too, especially because we can have more time to just chill in the sun, but I’m sure a few more days couldn’t hurt for most people.
Another pro is that you can do work out of order sometimes, so you do certain class work when you are ready to do it. Lastly, you can still ask your teachers for help by going to a Google Meet, which can be very helpful.
CONS: It’s not the same as regular learning, especially because you don’t use Google Meets as much now. Listening to a video of a teacher teaching you math isn’t like actually being there as a teacher teaches you math. Sometimes you don’t actually learn as much or don’t even learn anything from these eLearning days.
The second con is that you could get more distracted. The presence of your phones, game consoles, and other things could cause more distractions for some people.
Another con is that you can’t just enjoy the snowy weather anymore. In the future, some people won’t even know what a snow day is. This would be due to all these electronics that force you to learn on a day like this.
Lastly, I think that days like this could bring back bad memories for some people. This would be due to some of their family passing away due to the virus, or them getting the virus in 2020 and 2021.
So what do I think about eLearning days? Personally, I think that we shouldn’t do them because of the cons that I listed above. The pros are pretty good too, but the cons kind of overshadow them. Besides, aren’t we supposed to have fun on snow days? Aren’t these supposed to be days where we’re NOT supposed to learn at all? These days go against the definition of snow days, and should not be done.
As a brief summary: eLearning is bad on snow days.
