By Roleyna Abad, Staff Writer
I remember the feeling and excitement to hear that spring break would come sooner than expected, leaving us with an extended spring break in 2020. I was in sixth grade when the news came of the rapidly spreading virus, COVID-19. But what we didn’t know was that everyone’s lifestyle was going to change.
While everybody was happy about our month-long break away from school, eventually the lockdown came to last for the rest of that year. This led to remote learning, something that I, like most people, was unfamiliar with. In my experience, it wasn’t difficult to adjust to the new learning environment. It felt very isolated, yet comforting.
To make up for not being able to see people face-to-face at school, FaceTime and video games became something my friends and I heavily relied on. Prior to quarantine, I was already used to calling and playing video games with my friends after school and on the weekends, but it became something we did every single day even throughout our class time. This brought us very close together despite the social distancing restrictions.
Before COVID and at the start of COVID, I would say that it was difficult for me to feel comfortable around new people. But I made many close connections with people from my school whom I never thought I would be talking to and people from across the country. I even keep close contact with one of those people I met online today.
It is hard to believe that it has already been 5 years of COVID. I believe that it really did shape me as a person, as I felt the most comfort and safety in my own home during this time. The comfort of being able to talk to people without fear of being judged to my face like I felt when I was in school before quarantine. Now I feel even more comfortable to be around people that I don’t even know.
By Omar Ortiz, Staff Writer
We can all agree that COVID limited us from many opportunities we could have done, but we can also say that it has made us grateful for the moments we did achieve. While it was hard to live with the pandemic, it just became worse when you had to do online learning. Overall, COVID has affected our society and many students’ learning due to the limited resources that were given.
COVID affected me by causing me to become lazy with work, since it was so easy to give minimal effort in assignments through remote learning, especially in my last two years of middle school. Usually I wouldn’t even be paying attention in my online class and would just pretend I was. For example, during my online English class, it was so boring that I just fell asleep while listening to my teacher lecture and was then kicked out of the meeting because I was inactive. Lying on assignments became a regular occurrence since teachers would not double check the work, so it became an easy A. While it helped me pass my classes, it did not help me as we began doing in-person learning in high school.
My laziness got the best of me during the first few weeks as I was just giving my low effort in my assignments. But since it was a different environment from online classes, I began to actually care for school. Although COVID does not affect me as much now, I still get a glimpse of my online laziness today.
