COVID-19 has caused many things to change regarding school’s overall social and learning environment. DGS staff and students this semester have been experiencing a different way of teaching and learning in the many art and culinary classes due to being remote.

Culinary teacher Brooke Emmens gives insight on how her classes are doing and learning given the circumstances.

“I didn’t know what [it] was going to look like; we did send home stuff so we finally did kind of get a vision. We had student pick-ups where they came and picked up boxes of ingredients; some students got bags of certain equipment and supplies so that they could do the lab confidently with the correct equipment. We surveyed them and found out what their home kitchen maybe had and what we felt like they needed to be successful,” Emmens said.

Students have expressed mixed feelings about taking these courses while being in a remote learning setting, and how it changes the feel of them. Junior Adriana Loconti shares her personal view and experience from her drawing and painting class.

“For me, I’m more used to art since I [also] take it outside of school; I don’t find it as hard. It’s going to be the same thing inside class or outside class. “For art I feel like it’s easy, but if I was in any other kind of art [class] like jewelry, ceramics, culinary or pastries it would be so much harder because you’re doing it by yourself,” Loconti said.

Junior Dominick Passo shares his thoughts on his ceramics class, what he was expecting and how his class was given the necessary tools to succeed.

“I just at first was questioning how it was going to work, but I feel like my teacher, Ms. O’Brien-Prusa handled it very well. She made all the kids kits and stuff with all the tools, and she gave us all blocks of clay,” Passo said.

Passo also provides his perspective on the social aspect of these remotely taught courses, as well as what he wishes could be different about them.

“Well obviously I would much prefer to do it in person. I understand that for the teacher it’s really hard to get one-on-one with students and it’s hard for them to connect, so if I could [change] the connection with the students, I would,” Passo said.

Some of the students taking these classes have different views on how much these classes have or have not changed while being warped into e-learning. Senior Davion Duck expresses his opinion on the shift.

“Learning online isn’t really too different from learning in person to me. Even though we aren’t in person, the cooking is still pretty enjoyable. It’s not like it’s super complicated to the point where we’d need to be in person for it,” Duck said.

Many have shared in class and online what they’ve been doing in their art/culinary classes.

“It’s pretty fun, I’m just drawing [and] relaxing. I’m drawing shoes, just basic shoes; we just started and previously we did a ‘zentangle,’” Loconti said.

As school continues, students will eventually go into hybrid learning and be able to experience these classes in-person. Until then, this is how these classes will be taught and learned.