Who Are VHS Students?
The high school students who sign up for VHS courses do it for many different reasons and come from various backgrounds. Here are profiles of a few from the Class of 1998-99.
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Jennifer
Miramonte High School
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Jennifer is a fierce competitor and consequently a world traveller. She was an alternate last year to the USA Women's Wheelchair Basketball team which went to Australia, and she competed in the 100m, 200m and 400m races at the 1998 World Championships in England. She returned to Australia this April to compete in the Junior National Wheelchair Games. Jennifer likes the freedom of VHS, but she had to get used to emailing a question to her teacher and sometimes waiting a day for the answer. She is taking the VHS course Introduction to Computer Programming, which she calls a "fun class," in part because she "wanted to go into a class that I knew would be full of boys and show them that girls can succeed at programming as well."
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Charles
Shrewsbury High School
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After only two years Charles is what you'd call a VHS veteran. "I was there from the very beginning," says Charles, who weathered the early days of server crashes and other glitches. "It took a lot of patience, but I made it through as a better person." He first heard about something called an "online classroom" at an informational meeting at his school. "I learned that Virtual High School curriculum, although conducted over the Internet, was anything but centered on computers. In the end, it was the courses that made up my mind on whether I would take Virtual High School." Over the past two years he's taken Earth 2525, A Model UN Simulation, and Business in the 21st Century. He's currently enrolled in Web Page Design. Although similar in content to his regular classes, his VHS classes have added a whole new meaning to getting to class on time, he says. "All of my classes were occurring 24 hours a day. I sometimes saw people passing in assignments and contributions to class discussion at two in the morning." He found himself carrying on serious discussions with other students long after the class had moved on to other topics. As Charles explains, "Any person who states that communication over the Internet is impersonal really has no clue what he is talking about."
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Talib
Hoover High School
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Talib came to the United States from Pakistan looking for better educational opportunities. He enrolled in Hoover High School in Ohio his junior year and took two VHS courses before graduating and being accepted to Ohio State University, where he is now a freshman. Although VHS offered him the freedom of coming to class on his own schedule, it turned out to be one of its biggest challenges. "I think the hardest part of VHS is self responsibility," he explains. "There is no physical teacher watching what you are doing." Talib also liked the variety of classes offered, and being an avid astronomer, he took Stellar Astronomy. "[VHS] is more like independent study and it is more challenging," he explains. Wanting to improve his web design skills, he enrolled in Writing Through Hypertext and created a project on the provinces of Pakistan, which can be viewed in the Showcase section of the VHS web site.
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