I still remember the day like it was yesterday. The last normal day was Friday, March 13, 2020. Ironic it was Friday the 13th. I recall being in Mrs. Middendorf’s art class at Frontier Middle School and we were talking about the new spread pandemic. She was reading the newest information to us, listing off the schools that shut down for a couple weeks as an attempt to find a solution to this disease. I specifically remember her saying something along the lines of her calling it that they’ll for sure shut down the school district soon.
Then two days later it happened. On Sunday, March 15, 2020 we had received a message from the school that school was on a pause for two weeks. Because the virus was rapidly spreading, their idea with shutting down schools was the hope that anyone who has it first of all doesn’t spread the virus and second of all, has two weeks to fully get it out of their body. Towards the supposed end of the temporary lockdown, nothing was getting better.
It then became a whole month off, and then, just like that, we were off for the rest of the school year. Obviously we still had to do virtual work, but nothing was the same. In my eyes, all the students and even teachers were checked out by the time we were called off for a month, people were getting lazy with things.
The first two years of my high school experience were not normal in the slightest. For my freshman year, we first decided on this option called hybrid learning. The first half of the alphabet went on Mondays and Tuesdays, everyone was virtual on Wednesdays, and the last half went on Thursdays and Fridays. As if that wasn’t already a big change enough, soon the school board found it wasn’t the most efficient and effective way to handle things, so they switched back to virtual, which happened until the end of the first semester. The start of the second semester was us back in person fully.
You may think that this is where things start to go back to normal. While it was certainly an attempt to go back to how things were, things were not the same. We had to wear masks pretty much 24/7 at school and the amount of people in a class period was always fluctuating with how many people were getting quarantined. If someone had gotten COVID in your class, everyone within six feet of that person had to be quarantined (even if you had your mask on). I never got COVID personally, but I was quarantined three different times because I was in the same vicinity as someone with it.
Sophomore year things started getting back to normal but things were still different. For homecoming, half of it was outside as an attempt to limit the spread of COVID and the amount of people standing close to each other. Little things like that still made sophomore year better, but nothing was the same as before 2020 happened.
For me, it seems that by senior year, things have gotten back to normal school-wise but there still has been something different. For starters, as of December 8, 2023; roughly 6.9 million people have died from the COVID outbreak. Those lives lost are a significant amount and because of that, things and people’s families will never be the same. COVID will always have an effect on those people who lost their loved ones to the virus. From a social aspect, I know of some people who have been so used to online school, that they now struggle making friends and talking to people. It’s almost as if this thought of being more online is an excuse for people to stay at home and not socialize, even though the virus started spreading almost four years ago. Lastly, at least for me, I have become way more lenient on myself with work that needs to get done. Ever since COVID, I have procrastinated a lot more and pushed things off to the side. During the epidemic I always thought, “Oh it’s okay if I don’t get this one assignment done, we are in the middle of an outbreak right now after all.” It’s become a bad habit to break and I believe it stemmed from the online schooling we started doing due to the outbreak.
Yes, it has almost been four years since this epidemic started, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect our lives. For the people who did have it, they are apparently more susceptible to getting the horrible disease again, along with many other illnesses. From the high school point of view, my first two years were very far from normal, my junior year was more normal and adaptive, and my senior year was pretty much the only year things felt officially “normal.”
Even though it’s treated like a common flu and it doesn’t affect me first-hand, it doesn’t mean I’m not changed by the event that happened on March 13, 2020. I wonder how different life would be if the virus never happened, all the opportunities we could have had in those beginning years, and all those things we never got to experience because of it.
