Scott Conner
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my blended program allowed my parents to have more flexibility in what I did with my time. I became very involved with my robotics club and I was able to put in more hours than the kids who had a full schedule of classwork during the day plus homework at night.
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– Scott Conner
I have attended school in a variety of formats. I have attended a brick-and-mortar school, I have had a purely home-taught homeschool curriculum, I have attended a blended program, and I have had several classes that were taught purely online. So I guess you could say I’m extremely qualified to speak about the advantages and limitations of each system.
Blended and online programs can fit for students who don’t fit the mold in a brick-and-mortar environment for a variety of reasons. According to Gallup polls, more people have been historically dissatisfied with the American school system than satisfied. There are many good reasons to be wary of the public schooling system, as government bureaucracy has made the public school system completely insufficient for properly educating our younger generations. While I have personally never attended a public school — and have no intention of doing so — I knew a girl who was bullied in her school for two years because school administrators are not held fiscally accountable for having poor school environments. Her parents finally said that was enough and put her in a blended school environment. She was really happy that she didn’t have to be judged all day about what she was wearing.
For me, my blended program allowed my parents to have more flexibility in what I did with my time. I became very involved with my robotics club and I was able to put in more hours than the kids who had a full schedule of classwork during the day plus homework at night. I was able to put it about 20 hours during the last week of robotics in my sophomore year. The robotics coach was new and she hadn’t planned enough time for the club activities. So the club didn’t have a robot able to complete the challenges, when we were only five days away from the competition. I was able to save the situation and we won first place in the robotics part of the competition! However, the kids who were part of the marketing and presentation teams weren’t able to be so flexible with their time usage and we didn’t place in those categories that year.
Online classes added a lot to my education, as well. I was able to take very advanced classwork that my peers weren’t ready for yet. I wasn’t able to find local options for the advanced classes I wanted to take. Online, however, I was able to take Calculus 1 and AP Computer Science during my junior year, and AP Physics that was calculus based during my senior year. Online classes can open doors because it allows students to be taught by people who actually live far away. As an extreme example, my Spanish tutors are from Guatemala and I meet with them over Google Hangouts twice a week. The biggest obstacle to overcome with online education is that class schedules can be hard to remember about. Especially when meetings can be only once or twice a week for an hour, sometimes remembering what class occurs at what time can be a part-time job.
Multiple homeschool class providers mean that accessing each class can be completely different. As a simple example, I would often have to juggle multiple dedicated emails, so getting in the habit of checking the email addresses to see whatever information might be there was a significant challenge. Since the teacher doesn’t usually have a good way of contacting you other than email, this can lead to confusion and long delays between when a teacher reaches out to the student and the student receives the message. One time I forgot about one of my online classes for upwards of two weeks, and I was very lucky that it didn’t mess up my grade in the class.
Frankly, it is a big commitment to deal with the bureaucracy of taking classes from multiple sources. I wish my family could have found a service that would combine all my classes in a single portal, so that I could keep track of all the different formats (and when classes start, end, and have their scheduled breaks). I assume that eventually such a service will have to emerge as more and more homeschoolers start using online schooling as a way to take a wider range of courses than may be offered at a standard co-op. However, I am grateful for blended and online classes. In fact, I can’t imagine my schooling without all the opportunities I have had because of blended and online classes!
Because I have taken advanced classwork, none of which would have been possible without blended and online classes, I will be graduating from high school with an estimated 22 credit hours (transfer credit isn’t guaranteed until you get the number of credit hours from your final college choice). That is more than a semester of college! In the class I’m currently taking at a community college, a student was shocked to learn that I was taking Calculus 2 as a dual enrollment student. None of that would be possible without the power of the internet to bring me more opportunities to learn advanced topics!