People have many views about cyber schools versus brick and mortar public schools. In brick and mortar schools, there’s constant contact with other people which is a plus for some. At PA Distance Learning Charter School, students get to learn and experience new things. Independence is one of the most important factors of a cyber school student. Students are expected to learn and do things for themselves, this helps create lifelong learners and students who are driven and motivated. 

Below, we have listed our top 10 reasons why PA Distance Learning Charter School has helped us grow as students.

1. Teachers 

By Allison Harvey-Benedum, English 7-12

Learning is Messy

A new year brings new opportunities, new struggles, new ideas, and new friendships.  Moving through this year, PA Distance Learning wants to encourage its wonderful parents, students, and teachers toward a bright future by sharing stories and ideas from those who are bettering our world.  

By Elisa Carpenter, K-8 Music Education Teacher

by Hannah Lewis, High School English Teacher

In Virginia Woolf’s masterful and strange Orlando: A Biography, Orlando begins writing a long poem, “The Oak Tree,” when she is a young attendant on Queen Elizabeth I. She continues to work on it over the course of her 300+ year life, constantly revising, changing it, transforming it into something new. By the end of the novel, she plans to bury the poem under the oak tree of her youth that inspired the poem. That way, it can continue to transform and grow after she has passed away. 

An old adage says that “a poem is never finished; only abandoned.” I prefer to say that a piece of writing is never finished, only ready--to send, to publish, or to turn in! And while publishing a poem or turning in an essay for an English class might be a form of abandonment, it should also be an opportunity for that piece of writing--and the writer who created it--to go on growing like that centuries-old oak tree.

Why, then, do we English teachers so often assign numerical grades to a piece of student writing, then abandon it, along with its writer? 

We Are the Students of PA Distance…