Don’t you think high school is difficult? You have to wake up early, deal with rowdy kids and try to keep up with all your classwork while maintaining the grades you find necessary for future success. All that is stacked on top of the fact that now every action you take holds much higher responsibility and effect on both your life and the lives of those around you. Add all of these together, and you have the perfect recipe for the most stressful and mentally exhausting period of your life. Although it’s not an absolute peril. One of the greatest positives of high school for many is the socializing aspect. Being given opportunities to talk and hang out with old friends and meet new people are only a few of the many good activities that can make up for the terrors of high school! That is if you actually attended high school in person and not online like I did for most of my high school career.

During the early fall period of 2022, my family and I were faced with a difficult choice. The Park public schools district had begun implementing district-wide budget cuts in order to deal with reduced funding. One area the school began to cut into was its bussing program. To be more specific, Park decided to restrict the distance from the school in which buses would pick up students. This left many students, especially the ones living in Minneapolis, without bus access. I was one of those students. At first, my family decided to just drop me off and pick me up to and from school, but this quickly became unsustainable for us. Due to reasons I will not get into here, my family and I were facing significant financial issues during this period of time. Money was tight, and driving to Park from Minneapolis quickly began adding up gas costs, costs that my family simply couldn’t sustain. So, we decided to attempt something different. Around this time, Park began issuing an online school option for students who were in similar situations to mine. Due to a lack of better options, my family and I decided it would be best for me to sign up for this program. Thus began my three-year online schooling journey.

At first I was very nervous, especially when the time came to sign up for my first digital classes. Luckily, my nerves calmed a bit after being shown the list of classes to choose from. To put it simply, there were a lot. We’re talking way more than our in-person school has to offer, almost double if I remember correctly. This fact actually started to make me rather excited for online school. Add on to this the fact that I was told that the way online classes would work would be asynchronous. With us getting a very simple time frame of “finish by the class due date,” which would usually be an entire quarter. This all led to me making the foolish mistake of thinking that online classes would be a breeze for me. Oh, how dead wrong I was.

While yes, the extreme freedom the online classes provided over regular classes may be a very positive thing for the average student, it turns out that they may have provided me a bit too much freedom. It turns out that the extra responsibility thrust onto me all at once ended up being way more than I could handle, and I began slacking on my schoolwork. I don’t know when it started, but I began to miss days. While I was at it, I would make a variety of excuses in order to lie to myself that it was okay. “Ugh, my head hurts today, so I’m gonna take a break,” or “what’s one day, I can make up for the time lost by working more tomorrow,” were just two examples of the gaslighting I would put myself through to convince myself that not pacing myself well was okay. Another issue with online classes that most contributed to my increased procrastination was a lack of teacher guidance. All of the teaching in online school was either through reading or watching a video. If one had questions for the teacher, they had to send it through email. This added a layer to communications that made it harder for me to ask for help and receive guidance. Another issue was my having way too much access to the internet. This would repeatedly lead to me getting distracted in the middle of doing classwork, and I ended up losing huge amounts of work time.

All of these issues compounded together and led to me at times being weeks behind in classes, to the point that when deadlines started approaching, I needed to put in extreme hours in order to submit my work on time. I remember one time I stayed up and did school work for nearly 28 hours straight, and no, that is not an exaggeration. While this was an extreme case, the act of me having to stay up long hours in order to catch up was a repeated activity. Now, obviously, this wasn’t good for my health, both physically and mentally. It also wasn’t good for the quality of my classwork, which also suffered significantly. These “catch-up weeks” would often lead to me finding myself feeling extreme despair, and yet, despite this, I would repeat the same mistakes throughout my entire three years of school online. It even got to the point where in my sophomore year, I needed to enroll in online summer school in order to receive more time to submit my classwork. It was self-made despair, but despair nonetheless.

Eventually, at the end of my junior year online, I was informed by my counselor that Park would be ending their online program, and I would need to return to physical classes. Luckily, my family was in a bit of a better situation, and being driven to and from school was once again a possibility. This is what led me to return back to physical school life for my senior year. While I won’t say it’s been an easy transition back, as I have had many hiccups to get used to, and early on in the school year, I was missing a lot of classes. I will say that I am overall happier and in a better place mentally now. Being able to get direct verbal feedback from teachers and socializing in person with my friends has been a huge help to both my understanding of subjects and my mental health. While I can’t say my high school experience has been exactly normal, and I definitely can’t say it’s been all positive, I can say that there have been a lot of good parts that I will most definitely look back on fondly in the future.