The End of a Semester

The first semester of the 2020-2021 school year is officially coming to an end, and grades are being finalized. This semester has been a mess of hybrid and virtual learning, with the possibility of going back into the school building next week. Many students have continued to motivate themselves to succeed academically, regardless of the struggles of virtual learning. Sadly, others have not found their motivation, and have given up. Once a student who does not have motivation falls behind on school work, so much more piles up so quickly that even the thought of catching up becomes hopeless. The missing assignments become zeros and destroy the student’s grades. Some teachers are attempting to help the students that are falling behind by giving the students until the end of the semester to submit assignments. Although this may help some students find the motivation to do their school work, it is also making even more students feel more comfortable with the idea that teachers will not stick to deadlines. When the first quarter of the school year ended, many teachers told students that they would be accepting late assignments for full credit, even after they had already extended deadlines multiple times prior to the end of the first quarter. The same thing has begun to reoccur but across an entire semester. Grades may not be subject to change, because classes that were only able to be taken during the first-semester will now be over. Once the first-semester classes are finished and replaced with second-semester classes, students may not have the option to turn in late assignments because they technically would no longer be taking the class. As for the actual learning portion of the semester, students have not gotten to experience the class the same way they would have in a traditional school setting. These students have gone through an entire course, and although they have learned what they needed to learn from the course, they have done so without many of the opportunities they would have been given in a normal school year. These students, although the school’s staff has tried to replicate the course onto a virtual setting, were deprived of what they would have traditionally gotten to experience in the class. Although this semester has been rough, the only way to succeed is to find the motivation to not let the way this first semester turned out to discourage you from trying your best in the quickly approaching second-semester.