On March 19, 2020, the world went into a global lockdown. As COVID-19 ran rampant through cities, society had to find ways to function from the confines of our homes.
On the five-year anniversary of the COVID lockdown, four students and a teacher reflected on the lasting effects of quarantine.
Freshman Gabby Escobar
Q: How has COVID has affected you socially, especially with your peers?
A: COVID-19 had a profound impact on my social life, preventing me from meeting up with friends.
Q: How has COVID affected you academically?
A: Academically, it hindered my learning experience, as I found it more conducive to learning in a classroom setting rather than on computers. Consequently, I lost interest in school.
Sophomore Miguel Aguilar
Q: How has COVID has affected you socially, especially with your peers?
A: COVID changed me in many different ways, but it especially made me more introverted. I was in 6th grade when COVID hit, and I was very outgoing and always wanted to meet new people. But, 2 years indoors changed my perspective and made me more shy around people I haven’t met, although I’m still making new friends, just not as many as I believe I would have without COVID.
Q: How has COVID affected you academically?
A: COVID made me realize that academics could prosper online and that online courses may be a good fit for me. I succeeded much better with online learning as I could learn in my own time and comfort, and I found it much easier to manage my time, which i think has affected me even today with better time management.
Junior Jacob Valenzuela
Q: How has COVID has affected you socially, especially with your peers?
A: Back when COVID first happened, we were shut up in our houses and we started online school via Zoom and Teams and improvised work assignments and everything else we all had to do. I remember wanting to imitate school as much as possible and planning to move every time I worked on a new class. That fever ran off quickly. Even worse, I didn’t have a phone in sixth grade, and the only social interaction not with my family was through Zoom calls, which is pretty sad to say the least. That being said, I was socially starved by the start of seventh grade, when we started to integrate back into reality and physical classrooms. Masked but ready to talk, I talked with people I didn’t normally talk to and came out of my shell again. If you know me, you might even say that I broke out of the shell too much. Nonetheless, after we were released from the COVID prison, I started to become the person I am today.
Q: How has COVID affected you academically?
A: Honestly, I don’t remember much of COVID absolutely destroying my grades, but if I can talk about something, it’s that I learned to adapt quickly online and back at school. I was dealing with 3rd Quarter slumps when we got thrusted into online school. The only thing that I can remember getting hit with was pretty much my first taste of heavy procrastination, which I still suffer from today. Going back to school, I was ready to actually be taught lessons. I hadn’t realized the benefit of a real classroom until then, and in the presence of friends I began to thrive once more. And look at me now! People verifiably know me at the top of the class, pulling amazing grades without breaking a sweat. I don’t want to seem pretentious, of course, but the return to school from COVID helped develop the try-hard spark I still hold in pride.
Junior Mary Kate Heekin
Q: How has COVID has affected you socially, especially with your peers?
A: I definitely think I missed a fundamental part of my adolescence because of the Covid-19 lock downs. At the time, I was in 6th grade, and because my mom is immunocompromised, my parents made the design to home school me for 7th and 8th grade. Missing middle school heavily impacted my social skills, and stunted a lot of my social growth. I ended up growing apart from almost all of my friends, and often felt really isolated. This also impacted my freshman year at Kenny, as I kind of got a “fresh start”. While in some ways this was nice, my freshman year was incredibly overwhelming, as I tried to over compensate for the years I had missed out on. As for my peers, I think we can all agree that Covid was not how we anticipated our middle school lives going. However, we can only learn from the past, and we just need to be grateful for what we did have, and try to continue growing and learning through the rest of our school years.
Q: How has COVID affected you academically?
A: As far as academically, I had a very different experience than most of my friends. Because I was homeschooled, I was able to excel in subjects like english and social studies, and I was even able to learn French. My family also went on a lot of road trips, to the point where we visited 48 of the 50 states. While I am so grateful for these experiences, Covid definitely set me back in skills like math and science, and I al still seeing those effects today, in my day to day life.
U.S. History Teacher, Lauren Mosley
Q: After COVID how the behaviors of kids changed? Is there a difference in the ways teens interact with their peers and teachers?
A: I don’t personally see a huge difference in the behaviors of students overall, except maybe in the awareness of mental health. I think COVID encouraged everyone to take mental health more seriously, partially because we didn’t have a choice during the pandemic! I think the overall trend towards online communication vs. in person communication was going to happen with or without the pandemic, so while definitely there is more online communication, I wouldn’t say that in the classroom in-person communication has gone down or that COVID has affected the way students and teachers interact with others.
Q:Have you noticed a difference in teens academically, pre vs post COVID?
A: At first, I didn’t notice a change in students, but looking back, I think now that is because I teach 11th grade, and so for at least a few years, most of my students already had gone through their foundational education by the time COVID started, and so I didn’t really see a difference in students. Now that we are further out from the pandemic, though, I really see how missing a year or more of school did impact education. The effects of schooling online combined with some more recent effects of the growth of AI, have caused a lot of changes in my opinion. For example, students seem to find critical thinking more difficult, and rely much more on just turning in the answer or an answer than on whether or not they understand the material. As students continue their education they’ll figure out critical thinking, but I’m concerned it will be a rude awakening at some point in their careers. Vocabulary, interestingly enough, seems to have also declined significantly, and I’m not sure if that is a change in elementary education or as a result of COVID.
