For most, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is the biggest waste of time that online school has brought.

First of all, it doesn’t follow a reasonable schedule. We already have eight hours of Zoom classes four days a week; there’s no reason to schedule 30 minutes of Zoom in the middle of our Wednesday mornings. Students unnecessarily have to plan their days around those 30 minutes where we have to log onto our computers and listen to a random teacher talk about organization or watch a video admin put together. 

According to the Liberty E-News, SEL is meant to “highlight important state standards in Self Awareness, Self Management, Social Awareness and Management, and Social Engagement.” However, the lessons have turned into PowerPoints where administration puts out lessons to teach Liberty students how to manage stress, just for the sake of checking a box.  Instead, they should be actually taking the time to gauge what issues affect us and how to help students through online school. 

More often than not, SEL turns into an LSN-esque morning announcements, something that could easily fit into one of our classes if the daily schedules were reorganized. We don’t need to spend half an hour of our Wednesday mornings to cover these topics. 

Liberty students already have to sit at our computers for 32 hours of in-class time, not counting the hours we have to spend on screens doing homework. Wednesday is the only day during the school week where we get a break from staring at a screen, so what’s the point of making us go to another Zoom class just to watch a video? Our SEL time should fit into a regular school day, and the class should cover meaningful topics that will better the Liberty community.