My Experiences With Online Classes

Corona virus - an infamous name now permanently engraved in our minds. It has befuddled scientists and doctors, all of whom have no idea how to control this mysterious virus that is now spreading at an alarming rate!

This virus has changed the lives of millions of people all across the world. Even when people didn’t have anything to eat, they couldn’t step out from their houses for the fear of catching the virus. The death toll has risen up dramatically and the world superpowers are desperately trying to control it!

Corona virus, also known as COVID – 19, has in some way or the other affected each and every human being on this planet. Let me tell you about how this virus has changed many things for me – especially schooling.

In the absence of in class education, online classes have begun. Online classes were something I hadn’t heard of before. Now it’s a regular thing. Every morning I sat in front of the computer for 5 hours straight, attending class after class via Zoom. And by the end of the class, I was so exhausted!!

The first few days were all fun and games. Sitting there in front of a computer with a headphone, looking all professional, made us feel like grown-ups. However, after a week everyone realized that this was no different from normal classes, and we were mere students after all! The teachers would still call on us, we still had to do our homework, lessons were still going on, and at a faster rate too! And then, it wasn’t fun anymore. Despite all these problems, online class has also left me with some really fun memories!!

Whenever the teacher asked the kids questions and they didn’t know the answer, some of them would leave the meeting, imagine that! It was quite funny for the rest of us. Others would act like their mic wasn’t working. Yet others would keep asking ma’am to repeat the question and act like they couldn’t hear her clearly! Such clever tactics, don’t you think?!

It took people about a minute to discover private chatting on Zoom. And then, no one payed attention to ma’am anymore! Unfortunately, the teachers found out and disabled private chatting after day 1 of classes on Zoom. So then, the students found another way to kill time during class. Many of them turned their videos off and chatted during the whole class. I figured this out because we have a class group on WhatsApp and it would be flooded with messages during the class. All of them commenting on how sad it was that private chat was disabled!!

It’s another thing that our teachers soon caught up with our tricks! They then told us that it was compulsory to turn on our videos. This, unfortunately, quickly bought an end to texting in between the class. Truthfully speaking, I was kind of happy that we were rid of yet another distraction because I was finding it really hard to concentrate on class with so many funny messages coming in!

And, that’s when a lot of people started tinkering with their setting in Zoom and discovered how to add a virtual background. They would change their backgrounds to jungles, dinosaurs, Marvel and all sorts of other things that also proved to be a constant distraction! Soon our teachers banned this too.

And guess what the students did next, they started annotating on the shared screen, making teachers mad! This continued for some time until everyone got bored of messing around with the screen. That’s when our school decided to shift from Zoom to Microsoft Teams. In Teams we didn’t have to turn on our videos so people had a good time doing whatever they wanted to do other than studying!!

This new way of studying via Zoom, thanks to the extended lock-down, wasn’t as fun as in-class studying but it still left me with fun memories and experiences. I really missed all my friends too. Seeing all of them, even if it was a virtual picture, made me feel so nice. All the fun and pranks, though often distracting, was such a refreshing change from the usual, boring routine!!