Self Teaching Over the Pandemic

This pandemic has been a long one, and tough for a lot of high-schoolers especially. Whether someone is a freshman or a senior, high schoolers missed out on lots of school time during distance learning, which was crucial to their development in more ways than one.

Distance learning magnified almost everybody’s procrastination habits. With so many forms of entertainment available and taking classes from the comfort of your room, keeping track of what was going in class became harder than remembering the quadratic formula. Bad teachers and shorter class time just added onto this problem. This decreased the efficiency of distance learning overall. So, I decided to take things into my own hands.

Over the pandemic, I realized that distance learning would not work in any way or form for me. There had to be another, more effective way for me to learn. Knowing myself, classroom lectures were supplementary to learning the material myself via watching videos and reading the textbook for that subject. So, why not use a version of this approach during distance learning? And that's exactly what I did.

During distance learning, once school would end, instead of playing video games or scrolling mindlessly through Tiktok or Youtube, I’d look up online lectures on school subjects, such as AP Daily videos for the AP Computer Science, an AP class I was taking at the time. This would help me better understand the course material, as well as occasionally clarify any doubts I may have had. Any other doubts, I could ask my teacher the next day. I also looked up problems for the topics that I had trouble comprehending, which allowed me to get a better grasp of them. I was better prepared on tests due to this extra practice.

Just like I self-taught myself school subjects, anyone can use Verba to learn or practice public speaking. I myself don’t do debate, but the app has helped me improve my public speaking, and I’ve found myself using the app more and more before a speech or presentation I have to give.

- Aarush Panda