How being a child of divorce prepared me to split classes between Canvas and Blackboard

By Olivia McCormack

Gmail is the virtual version of the McDonald’s parking lot at mile 242 where your dad picks you up on Fridays.

Everything was going terribly wrong on Blackboard, but you’ve never known it any other way. You were used to the dysfunction. Like Bane from Batman, you were born into it. Then Sylvia decided to throw a wrench in your planned chaos by being wooed by the young and flashy Canvas. 

Is it a mid-term President of AU crisis? Was someone given a golf cart? Is this how we afforded the WONK cat mansion? I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t care. My life is slightly inconvenienced by this and that’s unacceptable. Was it not enough that I had to pretend not to notice the multiple bottles of pink wine in my dad’s fridge?

It’s an uneven split. Half of your life is on Blackboard, and like one of your classes is on Canvas. Blackboard is full of terrible memories, but Canvas means you can’t look at your class crush because their video chat platform is garbage. It, like two dry Thanksgiving turkeys, is a lose-lose situation.

But don’t stress, you’re prepared for this. You can be on Canvas and pretend to have no idea what Blackboard is up to. Do you have more classes on the other platform? You know not to answer that. Your other classmates may chime in, but you know your professors could get weirdly defensive about that. It doesn’t make any sense but professors already have weird loyalties to these platforms. You love and are annoyed by both platforms equally and will not fall into the same traps as your classmates.

It’s going to be awkward at first, but by the end of the semester we’ll be used to this little online community we’ve been forced into. Just in time to either be sent out into the world or pushed fully into the all too welcoming arms of Canvas.