By Anton Dedvukaj
Now, I’m sure we all know that 2020 got off to a rough start. Between the conflict with Iran that nearly caused World War III, the fires in Australia, Kobe Bryant’s tragic death, and more, it seemed like the plethora of tweets and social media posts complaining about 2020 were nearly inescapable.
Yet one thing that January brought us seemed like a bit less of a big deal: COVID-19. When the coronavirus first surfaced at the beginning of the year, many memes circulated around Twitter and TikTok about the virus, most of them making jokes about it. Little did we know that two months later, all other events that had so grasped people’s attention in January would take a back seat to this virus in a major way.
Now that the virus is a global pandemic, having spread to the U.S. and quickly making its way to Westchester, many jobs have closed and told their employees to work from home, and similarly, school has been shut down for the time being and Google Classroom assignments have come in to replace them.
These assignments range from a set amount of math problems to a specific gym workout to a practice regents exam online. Many assignments take a good amount of time to complete, and both core and non-core classes are assigning work nearly every school day. Is it too much? Are the teachers overcompensating for the lack of school time with an unreasonable amount of work?
It’s really a matter of perspective. Would this level of homework be unreasonable if there was still school and we all still got home around 3:00 or 4:00 PM every day? In my opinion, absolutely. This is multiple hours’ worth of work that we get assigned daily. However, here’s the thing: there isn’t school at the moment.
This work is merely a replacement for the work we do in school. In fact, this is nothing compared to what we usually do in school combined with homework. Now let me stress this: I am not advocating for anything more to be assigned. I’m just saying that this is a reasonable amount of work in my opinion, and the amount of work really isn’t a big issue.
Having work that takes a combined four or five hours on average to complete, not to mention being able to take all the breaks you want and being able to do so in the comfort of your own home sounds mostly reasonable given the unavoidable circumstances.
In my opinion, this level of work is probably the best way for the teachers to have made up for the lack of school. What I have had to do hasn’t been too difficult, and it still teaches new concepts relatively effectively. And that’s the way it ought to be.
