For a student like me, the COVID-19 pandemic made things very uncertain at first, because each day that passed was another day they could decide to close down schools. That eventually happened on Tuesday 24th of March but, by then, my family had already pulled me out. Even though most teachers tried their best to help, the transition to online education was challenging, as there was suddenly a lot of responsibility placed on students. In essence, no one could make them stick to the timetable at home, and there weren’t immediate repercussions for not doing work. And teachers would begin setting an awful lot of that.
Keeping up with all of it was draining. While students could contact teachers, they didn’t feel like it was worth it to send a message to ask some throwaway question, which meant these tiny problems would snowball. Also, I don’t think teachers were communicating with each other, and this made homework feel like a constant mess of which all students were in charge of keeping track of. I remember spending a whole weekend just doing major assignments which still needed a lot of work, thanks to the maths homework that was all set on one day and due the very next. Three times, I had to tell my maths teacher I couldn’t prioritise maths work, as it had been such a constant burden, and though I still managed to pull through each time, I got more and more frustrated. I can’t imagine how difficult it would have been had I not taken things seriously on day one. The school was forced to dedicate the final week of term to letting us catch up without receiving new work, because even top students weren’t keeping up.
Thankfully, the term is over now, and I feel like a holiday of planning will hopefully help the school coordinate things a bit better for next term. In my new void of spare time, I’m trying to bring back my guitar skills I learned years ago, and I have all the time in the world to realise I was never half as good as I thought I was. Until school starts back up, I think every student should take the time to stay in shape and learn a new skill. What else are you going to do?
