‘It feels like the year is pretty much over’
One-hour lunch period has turned into trips to the kitchen for snacks
After going to public school for nearly 200 days a year, for 11 straight years, we’ve suddenly been forced into new territory: studying at home.
Instead of waking up to an alarm clock by 7:30 a.m., we now wake up when we want. Instead of running to catch the bus, we mark another notch on the walls of our prison cells at home.
After schools announced that our marks can only go up, the motivation of students to complete the year plummeted. If you’re satisfied with your mark, it’s hard to find any reason to do the extra work. You can’t raise your hand to ask a question and get an immediate response from our teacher. That can be discouraging.
It feels like our school year is pretty much over. People want to throw in the towel.
It’s been an adjustment for our entire family. Our mom is amused by how we’ve turned our beds into makeshift desks when there are real desks in our home. Why get out of bed when you don’t have to?
The dining table feels like a conference room where we’ll cross paths. Our one-hour lunch period has turned into trips to the kitchen every halfhour for snacks.
We’ve had to adapt our indoor voices to the possibility of four Zooms or Google Meets going on at any moment of the day.
Even for soccer, instead of having three practices and one game a week, we’ve got Zoom calls where coaches present PowerPoints and teach us “game analysis.” You can see your teammates on a screen, but it’s not like being on a field and playing. Soccer, unlike school, is not something you can master online.
Haleh: For me, the biggest setback is the hit to extracurriculars. For our clubs and sports teams, the key factor is collaboration. Interviews and school elections are also being held over Zoom or through social media. That makes it hard to form connections.
My school feels less unified, like it’s everyone for themselves. To fill this hole at home, we’ve had more family time. We’ve ordered games like Scrabble (we both beat our parents).
To pass the time, we’ve baked as much as possible, despite the shortage of cocoa powder.
To our parents’ delight (and our dismay), we’ve had plenty of time to learn how to clean our bathrooms and vacuum properly.
Yasmeen: I consider myself an engaged student. But for the first two weeks after March break, I was waiting for teachers to give us stuff to do. They just sent out surveys to check our access to Wi-Fi and computers. Now we’re now being assigned more things. Before the pandemic, my marks weren’t as good as I wanted. Surprisingly, I’ve found it easier to learn online. My marks are improving steadily. Maybe it’s because I’m not stressed about my mark dropping or failing a course. In high school, there is a lot of pressure to get good grades, especially with university around the corner. Online learning has helped me understand my classes better because you’re able to work at your own pace.
Together, we find our stress level to have dramatically decreased without tests every few days. Exams being cancelled has lifted a huge weight off our shoulders.
No matter the effect the quarantine has had on all of us, we understand the importance of keeping everyone safe. This is one of the defining moments of our generation, so we’re trying to do our bit.
But honestly, it also feels like we’ve spent all this time doing virtually nothing. That’s the hard part.