ChalkTalk: The Faulty Reason Seminar Exists

CHS has been infected by the disease that is block scheduling, and everyone feels its sick effects. One of the more noticeable ones is Seminar, which is a 30-minute period of doing nothing. Because a lunch period longer than 10 minutes? Preposterous! Just like Study Skills last year, the administrators opted to not have a class where you have free time (sort of like study hall, a class that interestingly disappeared this year without a trace). One sketchy backhanded deal later, and ChalkTalk is now ours to use.

The teachers and staff did everything they could to promote this great new tool. They claimed how much it would help people’s ACT scores, even people who wouldn’t be taking it for another 3 years. Then, the fateful day came to try and use it. That’s when people realized these claims of “raising scores by 66%” was a bunch of garbage. See, this tool doesn’t do anything that Schoology couldn’t do, a tool that schools have been using for years. Yes, it does mess up occasionally, and can be unreliable, but ChalkTalk is even more unreliable.

One quirk of Seminar is that everyone in the school is in it at the same time. All 3000 kids, using a sketchy program at the same time is a recipe for nothing but lag. The students tried to use this tool during Quarter 1, yet because of this issue it was a mess. People got kicked out, had bad connections, and struggled to use this program that the school paid for.

Eventually, the issue was resolved by, quite simply, only having some grades on it for Semester 1. However, this included Sophomores, who don’t take the ACT for 2 years, but that’s neither here nor there. Now, in Quarter 2, we could finally take the placement test. This brought a slew of problems too. These tests are timed and give you less time than the front cover of the digital test booklet tells you to have, but it’s not a huge deal. The bigger issue is that if you leave the test, often the test will forget to pause the timer, so you run out of time despite not even having the test open. Imagine if you were writing an essay in English class, but you had lunch in the middle, so you left, but the timer kept on going and you ran out of time despite not being able to finish the essay. That’s how ChalkTalk functions.

Interestingly, it supposedly only works on Chrome. Students have the choice of 3 browsers- Safari, Chrome, and Firefox (People play games on Firefox, use Safari for work, and never use Chrome). Out of these three, the most useless one is what this shady site works on. All of this talk of it not working on certain browsers is also a load of garbage. I’ve loaded it on Safari just fine.

When you finally load it up on Chrome, you’ll be met with a loading screen. It will likely take 5 minutes to load a menu. When that finally happens, what do you get? Just a digital test site. Tons of apps we’ve used countless times do ChalkTalk’s job but better. It struggles to load an 8-page pdf and some clickable circles? Is it that hard?

There are countless things we could be doing to use the time better. We could be learning about certain clubs, learning about events at our school, helping students who need help with their studies, but you know what the best use of these 30 minutes are?

Using it as a study hall.