Think for a moment, how do you feel about virtual snow days? Do you like them? Do you think they are a waste of time? This article will be hitting the topics about what a virtual snow day is versus what a regular snow day is, how people from Lodi feel about virtual snow days, and how productive people are when they are schooling online.
First, you might be asking what is a virtual snow day. A virtual snow day is when the weather is too severe or dangerous for students and teachers to be able to come to school. So, instead of adding more school days to the end of the school year like they did prior to the pandemic in 2020, the school decided if we exceed a certain number of snow days we will have class online until it is safe to come to school. A regular snow day is when the weather is too severe to come to school so you just have a day off.
In Lodi, we have a diverse group of people and everyone feels different about how we should go about snow days. Some people believe that we should just have the day off and some people think that a virtual snow day is the way to go. Virtual snow days help us so that we don’t have to add school days to the end of the school year. Students don’t have to scramble to get their work done and teachers don’t have to cram in the lessons that they missed because of the weather. Some of our students like Keira Cartwright, a sophomore here in Lodi, feels like she doesn’t get as much work done as she should. “All I do is watch TikTok and play Roblox all day.” She says. Other students like one of our seniors, Addison Bell, find it easy to stay focused and on task while working from home. “Obviously on normal days, I’m not as distracted, but on virtual days I’m not distracted either because I am usually good about putting my phone away and putting other electronics away.” But even students who can easily put their devices away still struggle to stay on task. “But I would say I’m more distracted on virtual snow days than normal days,” Addison added at the end of her interview.
Sometimes even our teachers can struggle with their jobs on days that we are not in class. For example, the symphonic and wind ensemble band director Doug Hoeft commented that it is hard to have a band class on the computer. “It can be beneficial in the way that we don’t have people out on the roads and we can still have school in a way and it counts as a school day for us so that’s beneficial. But I don’t know if the learning is quite as good as when we are in person.”
Finally, how productive do you think you are on snow days versus a regular school day? And do you learn better in person or online? These are just some perspectives from two of our students and one of our teachers and how they feel virtual learning has affected their education and jobs.
