For the semester of the 2020-2021 school year, all of the AAT students were joining their classes through zoom meetings, most wishing for long-gone days when going to school every early morning, seeing the friends at school, and normally interacting with the teachers was just a normal daily occurrence. Though it is hard to say when the circumstances go back to normal, our administration has been trying hard to integrate real-life school back into our lives. Most of the students have had three real-life classes these past two weeks, where most of the students would be sitting in class and a few would be joining with zoom, so it was interesting to ask teachers’ opinions about this new hybrid model.
As many think this new model was a refreshing change, but it is not perfect. The consensus about this model was more on the negative side than positive. Irma Chelidze, one of the members of the math department, said that she was glad to have physical class and all the students back together in real life, but this model made a few things more difficult. It was hard to keep the zoom students engaged in the discussions because they were the minority compared to the number of students there were in class. But all in all, the mixed real-life/zoom classes were better than only zoom classes.
One of the teachers from the English department, Mariam Khidesheli, also agreed to these points. But she added that the students were now using this model to their advantage. There were more students in the zoom meetings than there were originally planned to be, which implied that the reason for staying was not because of the pandemic, but maybe because of general laziness or sleepiness. But this model was generally better than solely zoom one. Archil Makashvili, from the Physics department, said that, although it is nice to see everyone slowly going back to classes this system is different from both the only zoom and only real-life classes. The zoom classes paled in comparison to the older all physical classes. But it is getting better now that we are starting to go back, although it is still difficult to pay attention to both zoom and the class. Unfortunately, it is not going to be the same as what it was during the live lessons, even though everyone is trying hard to maintain the quality of the lessons and the discussions.
All in all, the hybrid model is far from perfect, but it’s certainly better to meet once or twice a week for classes to get back to the normal flow of life.
Edited by Mariam Khaduri
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