By: Matthew Yang

I joined Stratford Online Academy during the pandemic and the experience was exceptional. It provided me a safe environment for learning. The teachers were outstanding and made learning very fun. I gained not only academic knowledge, but also emotional development. The online learning experience was very unique and it had lots of features that in-person learning does not offer.

The online school provided the opportunity to go to school without any contact with the coronavirus, so I was able to stay healthy and focus on learning. In the early pandemic period, there were no vaccines and schools were stressed. Online learning provided a safe way of going to school without falling behind.

I was grateful to have incredible teachers who were kind and patient. My homeroom teacher was dynamic and funny and I was never bored of learning. My language arts teacher was creative and organized. The specialty teachers were very knowledgeable.

I gained lots of academic information from those wonderful teachers. I learned how to diagram sentences and wrote lots of essays. The book Don Quixote taught me how unintentional action could result in detrimental consequences. The nature’s healing power conveyed by the author in the book The Secret Garden was very insightful. Those books and reading comprehension questions really made me think. I also learned a lot about American Revolution in the history class. In math, I am able to do fractional division, equations, statistics, and geometry now. I really loved our science curriculum on Biology, Astronomy, and the Science Fair. The lesson on solute and solvent was taught using an experiment with root beer and ice cream. The mixing process of beer with ice cream still vividly lives in my memory. In computer science, I learned the mechanism of how the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) works. It has a spinning magnetic disk with lots of iron fillings on it. A small magnet attached to a moving arm arranges the fillings. As the disk spins, the head can also read the data by using a magnetic sensor. The reader attached to the same arm takes a filling to be a “1” and empty space to be “0”. We had two fun musical performances, one about holiday road trip and another about pirates. The PE teacher taught us how sleep, diet, and exercise could affect our health. The Spanish teacher patiently taught us the basics and grammar. We were able learn about the culture of Spain and gave a presentation. I learned to draw using a variety of techniques, such as blending and hatching in the art class, in which the famous artists, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Vincent Van Goah, and Pablo Picasso were also introduced to us.

I not only learned a lot academically, but also grew emotionally. I made good friends with classmates who love science and nature. We had an assembly each month to award the character achievement. I liked the fact that students can switch between online and in-person learning at any time because the curriculum for both online and in-person campuses was synchronized. The small class size online benefitted us because teachers could address everyone’s questions quickly. The teachers also recorded classes for absent students to catch up and provided 1:1 meetings that I really enjoyed. It was easy to track and finish homework because everything was accessible through the Schoology platform. Educational tools, such as Brainpop, Noredink, Tynker, and Wordlywise, aided us in learning the topics well too. During the exam time, teachers muted everyone and it was quiet for us to focus. There was no need to commute to the school and classes could be taken anywhere with internet access. I also enjoyed having lunch with my family.

I feel very lucky that I had such a fantastic opportunity with the Online Academy. I really miss my teachers and classmates. Although I am going back to in-person in the fall, I cherish all the fun moments I had with online learning.