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As all too many have learned the past year, online learning is not for everyone. Many prefer it, of course, but for many other students, especially younger ones, having to sit still and stare at a screen all day is next to impossible.
Kids have trouble staying focused under normal circumstances, after all, let alone amidst a global pandemic. Which is probably why a mother's story about her child being given "Zoom detention" has angered scores of people on Twitter.
In short, if you feel like the very notion of punishing a child for not paying attention to Zoom with more Zoom is layer upon layer of absurd, you are not alone.
The tweet thread that started the Zoom detention uproar came from Dr. Uju Anya, a linguistics professor at Penn State University.
This week, she was notified by her nine-year-old daughter's 4th grade teacher she had been sent to detention on Zoom due to her "inability to focus consistently in online class."
"She frequently gets distracted" sounds kind of like normal nine-year-old stuff right? Let alone a nine-year-old forced to sit stock still in front of a laptop all day.
Anya went on to say her daughter is "struggling to keep it together" as the pandemic drags on, which sounds about right—who among us isn't? She also conceded teaching via Zoom has to be a major challenge for her daughter's teacher.
But Zoom detention? For a nine-year-old? Who was just being, well, a nine-year old?
Quite understandably, that's where Anya drew the line.
In a follow-up tweet, Anya shared a detail that somehow made this whole thing even worse. Her daughter's school actually used the absurd—not to mention dystopian—phrase "virtual detention."
Unsurprisingly, Anya was flooded with replies to her tweets from other parents and educators.
In her final tweet addressing the replies, Anya confirmed her daughter would emphatically not be attending "virtual detention," which seems far more sensible than requiring Zoom detention in the first place.