Would you want to learn math from the comfort of your couch? Schools are beginning to give students opportunities such as these through online classes or video conferencing, which allows students to take classes anywhere they would like. These advancements come along with a new wave of technology that has allowed us to be more connected than ever before. However, online classes still have their limits. Online classes require a different set of skills to teach than what teachers have been taught. Although online classes would provide more flexible schedules for the students, the students would be distracted from the lessons, limited in the help they can receive, and losing the social skills that school provides.

First of all, while taking an online class, it is much easier for a student to become distracted than with a regular class. Today, more students than ever before have access to technology such as laptops, phones, and tablets. With an increased usage of these devices, much of the student population has become addicted to their devices. In many classrooms, teacher struggle to combat the students' addiction to their phones, having to take breaks in order to tell kids to pay attention. If students were allowed to take online classes, there would be no one to tell them to get off their phones and pay attention. When talking about video lessons done at home, one Generic_School student says, "I don't actually pay attention, I just go on my phone while the video plays." This is a trend that would be seen across a majority of students if they were allowed to take their lessons home. By going on their phone during the video, they will miss crucial points in the lesson the will prevent them from doing well in the class. Since the students will have missed many of the crucial points in the lecture, they will have questions about how to do certain things from the lectures.

Another reason is that students will not be able to receive as much help in the classes that they take online. Students in online classes will have missed much of the information in the lectures, so they will need to ask someone questions about what they missed. However, there will be nowhere for them to ask these questions. One option for these students would be to email a teacher. However, a response from the teachers may not always be reliable - in the past, if my teachers respond at all, it has taken some up to 4 days to respond. The student may be in urgent need of this information for an upcoming test, and if they aren't able to get the information on time, they will not be adequately prepared for the test. This becomes ever harder in subjects like math where every unit tends to build on a previous one. If a student misses the information and isn't able to ask a teacher the question, they will start to fall behind, possibly causing them to fail the class.

Finally, students who take online classes will miss out on learning the social skills involved in everyday life. In online classes, there is no interaction between students; it is just a student watching a teacher lecture in a video. Sitting at home removes interactions between students which would have created important social skills, lifelong friendships, and a respect for others. An infamous man from history who grew up in a situation without these three things was Joseph Stalin. As a young boy, Stalin was lonely and never had many friends. It was this loneliness that led him in becoming one of the most feared men in the world. He believed that the correct way to befriend someone was to scare them into it. He believed that when someone disagreed with a word he said, they should be killed. But above all, he believed deep down that this was a bad world and everyone in it hated him. If Stalin had learned simple social skills as a child, he would've been able to solve his problems more diplomatically, instead of relying on the violence he was known for. Social skills, learned by interaction between others in school, are crucial to a human's success in life, and without them, you will be lost with no way out.

Online courses would mislead students by letting them get away with not paying attention, giving them no way to seek out help, and preventing them from developing the social skills necessary to make it in the real world. However, others believe that online classes would provide students with extra time to have for themselves. While this is true, this extra time is used in ways that can hurt the students life. Many students wouldn't use this new found time to be with their friends, they would just end up sitting in their room on their phones doing nothing. Even worse than this, many students would take this extra time and begin to party, which may cause them to do things that could ruin there life. Keeping classes in schools is important so that the students are prepared to take the place of their parents and steer the world in a better direction.