Allyza Rucker
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Online school enabled me to focus more on my academics because I no longer had distractions around me, and it overall helped my academic performance improve to the best of its abilities.
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– Allyza Rucker
I chose to take online courses because I felt like they were the best thing for me to do at that time in my high school career. I was previously enrolled at a traditional brick-and-mortar school for my 9th grade year. I experienced the normal stresses of high school, like being overwhelmed and anxious. Even though it was difficult to keep myself motivated and to keep persevering, I finished my freshman year of high school. My freshman year was the first real indication to myself that something just wasn’t right with how school was for me at the time. I never really educated myself much about clinical depression or anxiety until about sophomore year when I was diagnosed with them.
My 10th grade year started in the Fall of 2018. I was already nervous about this year because I was enrolled to take an AP class. I was so overcome with stress and anxiety that it resulted in multiple mental breakdowns. I was admitted to a behavioral center and diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety. From my personal standpoint, I do not have bipolar disorder, but at that time the doctors thought I did because I was hallucinating, and my personality had changed drastically from how I was prior to all these things happening to me. I was very stressed at that point in high school and I had a lot of things on my plate.
I was homebound from my brick-and-mortar school for almost the entirety of my 1st semester of sophomore year. An instructor would come to my house with my assignments and help me complete them. After passing my classes for 1st semester, me and my family started looking into more options for my schooling. I had remembered that one of my friends was going to an online school through K12. I told my dad that I thought this was going to be the best decision for me academically and mentally. So, my dad got my enrollment started for the K12 school, Cyber Academy of South Carolina (CASC), and I got to start there at the beginning of my 2nd semester of sophomore year.
When I first started online school, it was very different from what I had been used to for the past 10 years of public schooling. I had to learn how to adapt and adjust to the new ways I had to go about doing school each day. Learning in a traditional classroom is very different from learning in an online environment.
I found that learning in a traditional classroom was very hard to do in previous years because there was always background noise. Online school enabled me to focus more on my academics because I no longer had distractions around me, and it overall helped my academic performance improve to the best of its abilities. It also lessened my stress levels and anxiety because I no longer felt the pressure of being judged by my peers, since no one in virtual school actually sees me in person.
Fast-forward to present-day 2021, I am now a high school senior who is graduating from CASC in less than 4 months. After this nervous breakdown, I wondered why something like this would ever happen to me, but I knew, deep down that everything in my life, up to that point, had happened to me for a reason. I may not have known exactly why in that moment, but I do know that because of it, I am stronger and more resilient than I’ve ever been. These past occurrences have shaped me into the young woman that I have become today.
Hence the coronavirus pandemic hitting, online school has also prepared me for online college classes, since I do not know how college will look for me this coming Fall 2021. I will most likely be taking hybrid-classes because I am going into Nursing, which requires a lot of hands-on lab and clinical instruction that I can’t get over a computer screen. All in all, online courses have allowed me to overcome tough obstacles and help me develop my ambitions in pursuing something more significant after high school.