Eva O’Leary captured beautiful photos of students of all grade levels with different perspectives of life. Many of the students from her series expressed how online classes made it difficult to learn hands-on material, and I couldn’t agree more. Senior Lisa Vecchiarello expressed her concerns for the future, “I’m personally kind of worried for my future and everyone else’s, I’m a microbiology major, and I want to go into the medical research side of things. COVID is preventing me from attending a lot of these hands-on courses.” I am also concerned about future courses and even a future career being online. This semester I was required to take chemistry lab, and my experience in the class did not feel real. Each week, I watched another student do the experiments that I would’ve been doing in person. I then am required to submit the lab report, and other homework based on the videos I watched. COVID has stunted my learning, the lab is designed to enhance physical skills outside of the textbook. Without thinking outside of the box during lab to solve complex problems on our own, someone else is doing the lab perfectly, and we are watching from our dorms on a computer screen. Junior Grant Davis worded this feeling perfectly, he says, “You honestly don’t feel as if you’re in school. You simply feel like you’re watching videos and you’re not part of the class.” Rather than feeling like I was in a lab, I felt like I was watching a lab TV show. After recently switching from Engineering to Architecture, I am even more worried about the online future ahead. I became an engineer because I wanted to design the future and create new physical ways to make people’s lives better. My passion for Architecture is driven by the same desire, to create. With all my classes being remote this semester, I am not developing the right practices and mentality of a creator. Instead, I am staring at a computer screen, watching other people create things, and learning how they did it.
During my online learning experience here at Penn State I have also found it difficult to communicate with professors and students. In the photo series, fellow freshmen Parker Gould explains, “In high school, I liked being able to ask teachers questions and talk to them at the end of class and get to know them, and that’s really hard to do now.” The adjustment from high school to college completely online was a challenging experience. I am accustomed to listening how directions carefully in class and following them accordingly. Now, there is no class, only zoom. On zoom, it is difficult to retain verbal information. Although I leave my dorm to a quiet place to be in a focused learning environment during zoom, it still does not feel like a class. Sophomore Tajah Green Tajah says, “I have a dry-erase board with a calendar built into it. I got index cards to put reminders on, and I put everything in my phone so you don’t get sidetracked when you’re doing remote learning and you can focus.” This year, I have tried numerous ways to stay on top of all my classes, I created an excel spreadsheet with all of my homework, I kept a written agenda, I tried google calendar. None of these methods seemed to stick, pen and paper felt strange because all my work was online, and online felt strange because I’ve only ever previously used pen and paper. This year has been a learning curve for everyone involved, students, professors, faculty, it is difficult to tell what the future will hold. I hope the vaccine will create a safe environment for everyone to learn hands-on material together once again. Below you will find the link to Eva O’Leary’s series.
https://time.com/5887324/college-campus-coronavirus/