Senior offers perspective on school year cut short

“It was the second week of April,” recalled Amber Collman, a senior at Cromwell-Wright High School. They had only a couple of days to decamp and prepare for remote schooling, time that their teachers spent scrambling to adjust to remote instruction and learning. Amber was a member of the girls basketball team that had its season cut short after reaching the semifinals of the state basketball tournament. She figured then that distance learning was imminent.

“That was a shock,” she recalled. “We’d won the first game and were getting ready to play the next game.” Instead, they piled into the bus and headed home.

For Amber, online learning was not new. Spring term, she’d already enrolled in five classes at Lake College Superior, plus pre-calculus and band at Cromwell-Wright. She’d been practicing for the spring concert. After the school closure, she practiced her saxophone alone and wrote down how she practiced for her teacher. You could send videos of yourself practicing, too. “But why practice if there’s no concert?” she mused.

How did she find learning entirely remotely? “You have to be good with time management. Since you’re not in school, you can decide not to do the online classes. But if you procrastinate, then you’re rushing to get work done, and it’s not at all good, especially with college classes.”

She said her teachers were pretty good at communicating, but sometimes their directions were confusing.

Amber complimented her math teacher, Pete Koenig. “He’d write notes online while talking. You could watch these lectures any time you needed to, though sometimes you couldn’t see or hear well.”

He gave them assignments each day, due by midnight. The students could ask questions via email, and he’d respond. “Then he’d ask you how your week has been going.”

On Thursdays, he offered a pre-calc Zoom class. “We’d get to see our classmates online.”

Group projects were especially challenging. For one of her college classes, they had to create a five-minute presentation. Her group chose to do a slide show on bullying. They divided up the research and each recorded his or her part. She felt that her group worked really well together communicating and sharing, even though they didn’t know or see each other.

Amber said teachers had a hard time with students who weren’t sending in their work. This was hardest for younger kids, she said. Teachers sent out paper assignments in a box with a lid, delivered by school staff and bus drivers to be picked up the next day. Some students didn’t return their work. Kindergarteners were especially challenging. “They’re so little, and they don’t want to sit at home.” Their teacher engaged them in artwork, cutting out different shapes, for instance.

For Amber and her classmates, a great disappointment was not being able to see friends. Classmates often shared work that was challenging, learning from each other. It was easier to do in person, she said. And she missed participating in track meets, always fun because “you’d get to meet other cool people at the meets, talk a lot and hang out.”

A big thanks to Amber for her student perspective.

— Ann Markusen