Working through this year has been a rollercoaster. I began the first semester in digital learning for the first time. While I spent some time online the end of 8th grade, it was disastrous with no sense of direction. My freshman year of high-school is not what i figured it to be. There was minor gain in staying home all day but I mostly found the online portion of my school year as the harder half. After low grades and tons of stress, I decided to finish my second semester of school in person.

Online school started off simple. Enter the teams call on time and sit through it until you’re dismissed. My grades were easier to keep up then but managing them got harder. There was no difference between school hours and leisure time. I spent most of the time in class on my phone because it was so hard to focus. Sitting in front of a screen for 8 hours a day is not an ideal situation. Engaging in school is important, but online school has no engagement. Around the second quarter it seemed more like we needed to get tests done and meet deadlines rather than actually learn. I finally came to terms with the fact that online school wasn’t for me when I began waking up exactly a minute before class started and hadn’t turned any work in for the past two weeks.

I wanted to go back to in-person school so bad. Most of the day I wondered what everyone else was doing at school. While learning in person there is a schedule to could follow, at home there was zero stability.

Going face-to-face midway through the year set me with a bunch of new problems. What if I sat in someones seat? Would I still have the same friends I did before? What if I get quarantined and i’m forced into the same online school depression slump again? But I decided to face it anyways.

The first quarter of my face-to-face semester was so much better. It was easier to get work done in class and I had interaction with other people. Even though when I got to the final quarter of the year and my grades plummeted again, it was so much better than locking myself in my room and staying in bed all day.

I find the only issue with school during a pandemic is the pandemic itself. Almost every teacher thinks our issues are pandemic related. Though it’s partly true, ever since the world shut down I noticed part of myself shut down too, the pandemic is only a set-back. As teenagers we have to navigate the same issues as before, It’s just seems like people are actually watching now.