Duncan Schools will not hold classes Friday, but students will still be expected to complete classwork.
The first virtual learning day of the school year will be Friday, and teachers will be pushing out class assignments through Google Classroom.
This is the first year Duncan has incorporated virtual days into the school calendar. Other virtual days have not been scheduled and were done as a result of too many consecutive inclement weather days.
“I feel like it’s a good idea on what they’re doing because I get to work at home,” eighth-grader Tate Armstrong said. “I wish it happened more often, and I’m going to do all the work in the morning so I can chill the rest of the day.”
Every teacher across the district will be assigning work for the day. Although most of the work assigned will be on Google Classroom, students without Chromebooks will be given paper copies of the assignments instead.
During the day, teachers will be meeting in collaborative teams, answering emails and checking on the assignments. The virtual days are intended to give teachers time to meet with their subject teams.
Armstrong said he thinks students may struggle to stay focused while they work at home.
“I think some people are not going to do the work or look up the answers to the problems,” he said.
Ivan Camerillo, another eighth-grader, said he isn’t excited about working at home on the virtual day.
“I think I don’t like this,” Camerillo said. “I’m not excited for it too much because I don’t want to do the work at home because it will make me tired and procrastinate. I’m going to do the hard stuff in the morning and the easy stuff in the afternoon.”
Four virtual days are scheduled for the year. Friday is the first, but others will take place Nov. 21, Feb, 13 and March 23.
Camerillo said he is nervous about having too many virtual days.
“I think they’re doing this for the teachers to plan or something like that,” he said. “I hope they don’t do this much often because I’m afraid they will take it out of our snow days and the Fridays in April.”
He said he plans to either sleep or my “Clash Royale” when he gets done with his school work.
Armstrong said he appreciates getting the time away from school, even if he doesn’t exactly know the reason why.
“I think it happened because school started too early this year and we have so many skip days,” he said. “I hope they do this more often in the future.”
