As of May 11th 2023, the Covid-19 pandemic has been deemed officially over. This doesn’t mean that its effects have magically disappeared. Take for example every student that has experienced virtual learning. Of course, this stunted every student’s development two years short, but what about the seventh graders who ended their middle school career online? How did it affect them? How significant are these effects? What can we do about them?
Originally when the pandemic first started out, students and teachers were instructed to stay home for two weeks. Unfortunately as the spread of the virus worsened, the isolation lasted the rest of the 2019-2020 school year. Then the 2020-2021 school year was completely virtual. The students graduating middle schools all across the nation were officially on their way to being high school freshmen.
The 2021-2022 school year was the first year to reopen in-person schools with new rules and restrictions for staff and students. All students were required to wear a mask at all times and keep a distance of six feet from others. This made the school environment isolating for everyone, as communication among peers was limited. A survey run by the Center for Disease Control in 2021 reported that fewer than half (around 47%) of students interviewed confirmed that they actually felt close to the people around them at school during the pandemic. These numbers are low enough without even considering the extra effects of transitioning to high school plus seeing new faces as students apply to different schools.
Imagine graduating your middle school online and then having to go start high school without your friends or any familiar faces. Now apply that to everyone else in your freshman class. It’s going to be challenging for everyone to adjust back to how school used to be. This was the experience for the Class of 2025 who are now in their junior year at the time of this article’s publication.
Numerous students still feel effects such as missing information and an unawareness of time progression. With almost two years of school and proper traditional teaching gone, many subjects taught in high school cover concepts and lessons built off of lost information during the pandemic. My friends and I often feel lost and are upset when we’re presented with information we can’t understand or process. In addition, I can say on behalf of my peers, we feel that time has flown past us faster than we can comprehend. Most of us were thirteen years old when the pandemic started, and many of us still feel that age despite being sixteen now.
From the 2021-2022 year and moving forward the world as a whole was in a rush to return back to normal. This was done without considering the mental impact the pandemic had on people, especially adolescents. Students and their expectations in school were flung across the place in that awkward transition phase. Many still feel the whiplash of the sloth-like pacing of the previous school and the rush to catch up afterwards.This year the feeling of being left behind is a very consistent feeling among my peers. Expectations were lowered during virtual learning, but skyrocketed back to normal by the next year. Picture yourself walking down a road only to fall into a hidden culvert and end up in a dirty pond. That is the feeling of the shift in expectations over the course of the years.
This doesn’t seem fair right? So why should our schools be doing this to the students? There should be some leniency towards all students even in a post pandemic society. Psychologically, students are not their age nor at their appropriate grade level. Society has changed how we treat everyday occurrences because of Covid-19. When someone is sick they wear a face mask and prioritize hand sanitization. Even our fashion style has been affected as people are more willing to wear comfortable clothes out in public, compared to exclusively at home. Schools and student expectations should not be exempt from this. Covid-19 changed everything, we need to accept that everything is different now.
Written by Ava Lewis
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