Recently, as most students and staff know, there was an internet outage both here at South and at Roosevelt High School. This outage caused a host of problems for both schools and definitely disrupted learning, “Without internet, many classes were unable to complete necessary class work,” said South junior Ian Mackimm. Although learning was largely disrupted, some teachers found a way around it.

Some teachers used the internet through their cellular service, and were able to display things like slideshows onto the screens in their room by putting their phones underneath document cameras. Some teachers had other ways of dealing with the outage, “It hasn’t affected me much… we wrote sonnets… I used my hotspot for attendance,” says Open teacher Michelle Ockman. This approach is interesting, and makes some question whether or not having the internet actually helps our learning.

In addition to teachers, students definitely felt the impacts of this outage. Many students found themselves with nothing to do during classes, since a lot of classes are based off of online assignments. South senior Nara Coldwater explained, “we just couldn’t do anything.” Although this was not true for every single class, many students felt this way during the outage. Many classes are almost completely based on computers, and students were unable to even log into computers, as doing so requires the internet.

While this was one aspect of the outage, it also caused other problems. Mackimm also felt the impacts of the outage in a way that many students were not cognizant of; “Some standardized tests were even postponed… Many students use cellular data to stream social media and games, and with the lack of school work, the phones were going rampant.” Without internet, much of the school had a hard time functioning.

After this brief outage, it was apparent that Souths students and teachers rely on the internet to a huge degree. Many classes were debilitated, and students were constantly using their phones in order to get online.