During the morning of Oct. 24, 2024, the internet at St.Louis Public Schools went out the second hour of the day. Staff and students were confused as to why nothing was working until it was discovered that a digging accident took out the fiber optics that provide the area with internet. One thing is for certain: this outage had messed with many lesson plans for the rest of the day.
The time the outage was fixed was sometime after the school day. Some say a tractor hit a pole while others say the reasoning for the outage was a farmer accidentally dug up unmarked fiber optic wiring. With the internet now fixed, lessons have resumed as normal with a few hiccups in plans.
Many teachers have resorted to online learning using things like Google Classroom to assign things, and Google Docs in order to receive essays that are easy to grade. With the WiFi halted, plans were pushed back a day for every class, except the first hour of the day. Many teachers who utilize online learning had to resort to having students do missing work or catch up on uploading assignments. Of course, this didn’t affect any of the teachers who learn from offline materials, such as a textbook.
One of the teachers who teaches from the book is Mr. Nehmer, because he feels the book is better to learn from than the internet. Nehmer said, “I was not too worried about it (outage) and it did not change what I did too much for lesson planning. Although it ruined doing some things for current events.” While the outage affected minor aspects of the day’s lesson plans, the overarching lesson of the day was not affected.
On the other hand, Mr. Giles is one who relies on the internet for his lessons. According to Mr. Giles, “My initial reaction was that my Econ students lucked out because we had a test that day. I use an online format for testing called Socrative, and therefore could not give the test that day due to the outage.” Though Giles teaches more than just economics, “this affected my other classes as well, as I usually do slideshows and use Pear Deck to present the information. I had to resort back to the book and have students take old fashioned book notes. Students were not a fan of this style of note taking, but we were left with no choice with the outage.”
The internet was on the next day and lessons resumed once again allowing students to get some more work done before the end of the marking period and boost their grade for their classes. With just a day of setback, all classes have adapted and changed the lesson to make up for the missing day.
