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Students React to Remote Learning

Emma Cheung ’23

“To me, nothing really compares to being in-person, but safety always comes first. With Zoom classes, I have a harder time managing work because it’s harder to collaborate with teachers and to do work. In-person, you have the opportunity to collaborate with classmates and it’s easier to talk to teachers.”

 

Robert Nicolas ’23

“I think remote learning has been enjoyable compared to last spring… The main difficulty with online learning during the fall has been staying connected with friends. Even though you all are online, time zones have been quite challenging for wanting to talk to people. Also, [it’s difficult] staying motivated while being online since it’s quite hard not having other people’s energy to bounce off of. I’ve been connecting with people through FaceTime calls with friends, video games with friends like ‘Among Us.’ It’s just been a lot of virtual interactions.”

 

William Situ ’22

“Remote learning feels quite different from actual in-person classes. There’s no doubt I prefer in-person, but I think this fall’s schedule is a huge improvement from last spring, and it gives students a lot more structure. Also, I connect with friends over Zoom and Discord.”

 

Michelle Yao ’23

“Speaking from the perspective of an international student, we have schedules based on our time zones, usually starting off our day around 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. and have a big gap in-between, and then end our days from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. I actually like it better than [when] I was on campus because the big break in the middle of the day helps me have a long time to sit through all my homework. Also because I can take afternoon naps to get me through, since we sleep later now due to the night classes.”

 

Kianna Jean-Francois ’23

“I’ve been focusing on time management and scheduling by using a planner and reminders in my phone and also alarms. Also, planning out my work ahead of time and knowing when my homework and assignments are due has helped. Some challenges of online learning have been not being able to interact with classmates as much as we would have been able to…also not being able to directly communicate with your teacher in-person, but using email and conference period have been helpful.”

 

Amina Hurd ’23

“I really love the schedule and I love how they’ve made it so that people in all time zones can experience synchronous classes because I feel like I really benefit from learning from a teacher, whereas [in the spring] it was mainly just learning things on my own and figuring things out on my own. Since I’m in California, I’m on Pacific Time which is three hours behind Andover, which honestly hasn’t affected me as much as I thought it would.”

 

Sabrina Codrington ’21

“Remote learning is kind of fun for me because I haven’t learned under the same roof as my siblings in a really long time and it’s kind of interesting to get to know them for a second time. But it’s also kind of frustrating because I do live in New York City and it gets really loud, especially at night time, and at my night classes I just have to try to focus on Zoom and ignore the background noise.”