In the past few weeks, more and more teachers have told us that we are living in exceptional circumstances. COVID-19 as been a pain in our asses for the past few weeks, infecting over a million people worldwide as of today, stopped economies and caused governments to shut down schools, community centres, any place that can hold a mass gathering. Crosses on chairs and tables have become a familiar sight, as well as 1-meter lines in queues to practice social distancing.
On the 4th of April, PM Lee of Singapore addressed the nation, imposing a nationwide lockdown on schools for the next month. It’s ironic that 3 days ago, we received an email that said the school would be restarting on the 6th of April after the 2-week school break, and the PM said that schools will not be shut down 3 weeks ago. Exceptional circumstances also mean adapting to new changes quickly.
Because of the lockdown imposed by the government, it now means that we have to do school from home. In my opinion, remote learning will be harder than actually going to school. We do get the freedom of doing what we want, as there are no teachers to tell us that we need to focus, but in order to actually learn anything, we need to pay attention to our devices, for instructions and for video calls. Devices are a distraction in itself, we are able to search up anything on our computers without our teachers ever knowing.
To learn anything from our teachers, we need to have a lot of self-initiative, something that I still feel that I need to work on. We need the self-initiative to be able to focus on what the teacher is saying, the initiative to complete work given and speak up when instructions are not clear enough. We have to be responsible, which is a lesson in itself.
We do have to commend technology for the resources that we have available today that makes remote learning even more possible. This would not have been possible 100 years back. Technology has made communication easier and faster, so we are able to conduct online classes in real-time. It is the only real option to keep us all in school for the next month, so we will all have to find a way to develop the self-initiative if we want to learn something.
Photo credit: https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200×800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/03/21/9d4240b0-6aab-11ea-9de8-4adc9756b5c3_image_hires_163702.jpg?itok=sU1Htnrx&v=1584779831