A Child's COVID-19 Story: School In Covid
There is no doubt that Covid-19 has completely changed our lives and destroyed what we used to call normal. To make things worse, there is no way to tell if we will ever return to the lives that we had before. Even with the pandemic behind us, there will never be a way to completely rid our minds of what we just went through. This pandemic is something that will be remembered for the rest of our lives, the lives of our children, and their children. The best thing that we can do now is to record our experience and eventually share what our lives were like during this worldwide disaster.
Covid has brought many changes to my life with things like mask-wearing, not being able to see friends, staying six feet apart, and many more, but the main thing that I am going to be talking about today is what school was like during this disaster.
Covid originally started in 2019 across the world, and I currently live in America. So, for the first three months of the virus’ existence, I was mainly unaffected. That all ended when Covid finally made its way to the U.S. The virus started off small in America, but the cases soon started growing rapidly. This caused many schools and businesses to transition to an “at home environment,” thus preventing the students and staff from coming in contact with one another. Then, just like all of the others, my school soon switched to the same environment.
I was in sixth grade when my school announced that it would be switching to a virtual format, and when we heard this, my classmates and I all believed that Covid was a blessing. We believed that Covid would prevent us from having to do school for the rest of the year. We thought that this would just be a minor thing that would pass by the end of the year, but, as you now know, we were very, very wrong.
It began with the school saying that we would be back by the end of the week. Then once they realized that the students wouldn’t be able to return, they gave us a two-week break and a statement that we would be doing at-home schooling from now on.
After the two-week break, school began again in an at-home environment that honestly felt much easier than going to school in-person. I started doing my schooling at my kitchen table. I didn’t have to put on any school clothes, or even make myself look good since no one would see me except for my own family members who were also doing school from home. All of my classes could now be done in any order, and all of my schoolwork could now be done on an app called Google Classroom. Most other schools made students do video calls for every class, but my school didn’t have us do any of that. This was the way school was for the rest of the school year, and I never returned to the elementary school again.
Seventh grade started with something new that neither I nor any of my classmates had ever experienced. In sixth grade, the schools decided to go into a completely at-home learning situation, but in seventh grade we started school in a hybrid format. This basically separated the entire school into two alphabetical groups: A-day and B-day.
Each day one group would be online, while the other group was in-person. When online, the school made us do video calls using an app called Zoom in order to participate with the people in-person. When in-person, we would simply do everything that the students that were online did, just that we would be in the actual building. Hybrid was created to limit the number of people in the school at once while also giving students the chance to talk to the teachers in person.
This continued for three of the four quarters in the school year, and for the very last quarter, the school was meant to return to 100% in-person (at least that was the plan.) The fourth quarter started with all of the students returning for the 100% in-person, and this lasted for less than a week before all schools in the district were shut down again because of an increase in Covid cases. After the shutdown, the schools went back to at-home learning with no way of knowing if we would return.
Starting when I was 12, and still continuing, this pandemic has been changing things all over the globe. Now it’s currently Spring Break, and the last thing that I have heard from my school is that things will go back to 100% in-person by the end of the break. There is no way to know if I will ever return to the building during the rest of the school year, but I guess that is just what Covid has been doing to the world. We have no way to know what will happen next during this pandemic, and to be honest, that’s the thing that I hate most about it.