I think I can finally take a few minutes to process all of the twist and turns of joining a virtual school. Last Wednesday, Brian started his freshman year of high school at the Washington Virtual Academy (WaVA). To ease into the school year, WaVA is using a "Ramp Up" schedule which means they are introducing one or two classes a day instead of doing all of your classes on day one. Each class has an orientation that you are to attend where each teacher introduces his/herself to you and explains how their class works. Brian has not started all of his classes yet, he still has computers and history to start up. The orientations have complicated our life somewhat in that they are live sessions and you have to schedule your day around them. Wednesday we had a class at 11, 12, and 2. This made for an extremely hectic day as I was working with Bryce on his schooling, and trying to get our church ready for AWANA. My head was spinning by 5 pm and still can't believe that the day ended with no real complications.
Brian is my one kid who doesn't like change and doesn't like be told what to do. He likes to call the shots, so WaVA is going to be a big learning curve for him. Yesterday, when he sat down to do his science assignment I think he was going to revolt when he realized all of the steps his assignment required. He had to pull up his science assignment, copy and paste to a word document, fill it out, save it, and then submit it the dropbox. Sounds easy right? For Brian it was a lot of hoops to jump through. After brooding about it for a while he took off and ran off some steam. Then todayhet sat down and did it. He even had a smile on his face.
I know that this whole virtual school is going to push Brian academically. One of the big reasons I wanted him to do the virtual academy was for the accountability. The kids are more likely going to do their best for someone else than mom. Also, WaVA takes the pressure off of me when it comes to his high school transcripts. I wish I could afford a Christian on line school but it just isn't possible.
I started writing this post a week ago (Read next blog...Too Busy to Blog), but I wanted to finish it. During this week Brian finished all of his orientation, has taken several quizzes in math and has almost completed his first English test. He has learned how to install various things on the computer and already knows more about the computer than I do from his class overview. He is in the process of completing his PE fitness test and we have joined the local gym as a family so that he can get all of his PE requirements done. Thursday and Friday was spent taking assessment tests in math and reading and this weekend he is catching up on his school work that he wasn't able to complete due to the assessment test. Overall we are slowly getting the hang of WaVA.
Awesome! I've been thinking about you guys all week, wondering how it's going. So glad to hear Brian is getting the hang of it. He's going to do great!
ReplyDeleteHe is feeling overwhelmed at the moment because the assessment tests took so much of his time and brain power. : ) To take tests he had to figure out how to turn off his pop up blocker and clear the cookies off the computer for them to work. Then he was told that the tests generally take an hour each but that the math test would not end until he had missed so many problems in a row. After two hours of testing in math he got so frustrated that the test wouldn't end that he began to purposely give it false answers so that it would shut down. We will see how that affects him. Then when he tried to log back into his course the computer wouldn't work right. It took us all day to realize he needed to turn back on the cookie function because the WaVA website requires that. He was so fried that he didn't log back in until Friday night and will be doing catch up tomorrow as well.
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