My Twenty-Fifth Week as a Senior

April 6 - April 9

This was my first week of remote learning and I feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. Overwhelmed because it’s hard learning Calculus from pictures of solved worksheets and because it doesn’t have the same disciplining effect, so my time management hasn’t been the best. Underwhelmed because, being in 2020, you’d think there would be a better solution to this crisis than Google Classroom. No hate to Google Classroom, although a lot of my friends tried giving it poor ratings so the app would be taken down and they wouldn’t have to do their homework (it didn’t work). It’s just that my style of learning requires a lot of guidance from and interaction with my teachers and I don’t want to pester them with 50 emails a day (I keep it to a maximum of 2/day XD). But, I’m still very grateful to have some sort of education going because of everything that could happen, at least they didn’t decide to cancel the school year. I need to learn!!!

So, because I’ve been gone for so long and because this week, learning was a lot different than usual, this post will be long.

A quick recap of what I did over the extended March Break: We started and finished Chapter 4, Curve Sketching, which was torture to learn online. It was less of “Oh wow. This is easy,” and more of “I don’t understand this; I’ve lost all motivation to finish my homework.” Thankfully, there hasn’t been an evaluation yet, so I have time to watch YouTube videos about it and catch up. For English, the only assignment we had was to read our ISU book. If you guessed that I didn’t even touch my book, you ware absolutely right. Fun story coming up.

In our last Writer’s Craft class, before the break started, our teacher gave us a package of sheets to complete. Some were assignments with a deadline, like completing a character sketch, writing about the Author’s Commentaries we read in the Sixteen by Twelve book and vocabulary paragraphs for Week 3 and 4. The others were worksheets she wanted when school opens for a completion mark. They were mostly about punctuation and concise writing. I finished my Writer’s Craft homework with the most happiness because it was the only one I really understood and wanted to do.

Besides what COVID-19 did to my education, it has also ruined my sleep again. I stay up through the night and sleep during the day. I do get a lot more done like this but I’ve barely interacted with my parents and I feel for everyone who works night shifts.

Anyways, they announced sometime during the last week of March that schooling would resume online on April 6th and I buckled up for an awesome week.

My Math teacher sent us our 5.1 work on Sunday so we could ask her questions on Monday. Chapter 5 is about the derivatives of exponential and trigonometric functions. The first section of the chapter is about the derivative of the function containing e, or Euler’s number. Basically, the derivative of e^x is e^x. So, we can use this property to our advantage when it comes to derivatives of other functions. For English, we were given our first ISU assignment (besides the reading). It was to write about 3 themes found in your book. Jokes on me, I hadn’t read the book enough to know even one theme. Did that push me to start reading it? BIG NO. Then, in Writer’s Craft, we were told to write down everything we know about life. We had to sit down for 20 minutes and come up with as many life lessons as we could. Then, we had to narrow the list down to 1 or 2 and send them in. I finished my Math and WC homework during the night and was too tired to start English, so I went to sleep instead of doing that. My wonderful Math teacher posted 5.2 for the next day.

On Tuesday, I didn’t get any more work from my teachers because two had given a deadline for Wednesday and one had already sent in that day’s work. I reviewed my Writer’s Craft homework and sent in two of my life lessons. I would share them here, but my friends read my posts and I don’t want them to know which ones I wrote. I didn’t do much for most of the day, considering I woke up around 4 pm. I watched some YouTube videos and then started reading my ISU book for a little while. I got bored pretty quickly so I moved on to watching TV. I don’t recommend doing anything I’ve done this week because it’s definitely not the definition of discipline. My Math teacher uploaded the work for 5.3.

I started reading my book for real at 2:40 AM on Wednesday. My assignment was due at 10 that morning. I read about 110 pages of the 443 in the book till 7:20 AM when I finally accepted the fact that I wouldn’t finish in time and should just read the summary. Thankfully, I had gotten far enough in the book that the summary didn’t really have anything too surprising in it. Just a few new characters and a detailed description of what I already knew from what I had heard about the book. I had read about 80 pages in class, so I was almost halfway done. I quickly wrote down all the ideas I had and submitted a good copy of that work around 9 AM. I wrapped up all of the ISU work and then my English teacher sent us a Distance Learning Bingo assignment. We had to do 3 things in a column and submit it to her by next Tuesday. I went to sleep after reading the assignment.

When I woke up, my Writer’s Craft teacher had posted a new assignment. She explained that she wanted us to start our ISU, which was writing a short story, by starting with the theme of the story. The life lessons, according to her, were good themes to write a story about. I don’t know if I want to write a story based on the lessons I submitted or if I want to select a different one, but I’ll keep you updated on my progress. She wants a short, rough outline of the story (theme, plot, setting, characters etc.) and, once that’s been submitted, she wants to speak to each of us over the phone. I have never spoken to a teacher over the phone; I don’t know how to behave properly in such a situation X(. My Math teacher uploaded an assignment that would fill in as an evaluation. It was just a few questions from the textbook. She wanted us to send pictures of our work for the mark. I did 5.2, which was about the derivatives of polynomial functions, and 5.3, which is about optimization (cue nightmares about Chapter 3), while watching TV.

I finished my Math assignment around 7 AM on Thursday. The deadline was 3 PM but I didn’t know if I would wake up by then. It was a lot easier than the homework we had been assigned, so it didn’t take long to write a good copy of my answers and take some clear photographs of the work. I finished and submitted my English Bingo assignment. The three things I did was suggest a song that would be fun to analyze in class (‘Only the Young’ by Taylor Swift), write a review for an app called ‘Cells to Singularity’ and write a six-word memoir. I wrote “Now I sleep at 10 AM,” which is when I went to sleep that day. The explanation I gave was that this a representation of how the COVID crisis has affected my life. I love my sleep, regardless of when I get it, but I like to have some sort of routine. And with the boredom of being inside coupled with barely any schoolwork, it’s hard to feel tired enough to sleep when I should. Which leads to me sleeping at very odd hours. Anyways, my teachers mostly just told us not to expect more work till next week because of the long weekend and now the only thing I haven’t completed in the Short Story Outline. I’ll get to that today and submit it to her by tomorrow.

I’m glad this week is over. It was new in many ways and kind of fun too. I don’t think Zoom is approved by our school board so there probably won’t be any video conferences for me.

I hope you are all staying safe and sound. Take care of yourself and your loved ones and please listen to what the health professionals have to say. They only want what’s good for us. See you later- Aarushi