Well, ladies and gentlemen, enough time has now passed from the pandemic that it’s common to find kids that do not even remember it. This was quite a painful realization for me, as the pandemic took place throughout the entirety of my middle school experience and felt like a vital chapter of my life. Another startling realization was that my youngest brother who was in 1st grade when the pandemic started, is now going into 6th grade, the same grade I was in when quarantine began.
The truth is the pandemic was a stressful time for everyone, filled with a lot of pain. It is rare to hear someone say they would want to do it all again. Initially, we were told it would just be a few days. But days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. This seems like the opposite of a “nostalgic” time. However, there is something about the overwhelming pain we experienced in the pandemic that forced us to find solidarity through finding the treasure in the trash. Even when most of the days blend together, the few good memories stick out distinctly. Now with the power of retrospect, it makes sense to reminisce it.
I wanted to hear about what students and teachers within Overlake missed from the Pandemic, and how their overall experience impacted them. To do this, I sent out a form back in February to the upper school and performed multiple interviews. A standout theme from the form was a struggle to learn within the virtual format. Multiple students expressed memories of signing on just leave, skipping class “at least once a day”, faking tech issues, or showing up to every class at least 10 minutes late. However, students that did put in the effort still struggled, nonetheless.
Online school was a fever dream. We did not learn much besides how to skip class. Those who did put an effort to learn still struggled to retain information because of the lack of interaction with teachers. One student stated that they “showed up to every class and learned next to nothing”. Teachers themselves also found frustration with this isolation. Jenni Baldwin, English 9 teacher, stated that the inability to interact with her students and answer questions made teaching much more difficult, and even led her to question whether she wanted to end her career as a teacher. On top of struggling to learn how to do basic things one learns in school, we also stopped learning how to socialize. Jenni Baldwin stated that to this day she sees students struggling to communicate effectively with one another. Despite the holes quarantine left in our education and social skills, there were still some fun memories we made.
A particularly fun class for students to look back on was PE- although there may not have been much physical education. One sophomore claimed she would tilt her laptop camera up so it would look like she was doing push-ups, when she was just laying down and coming back up. “Mr. Jimenez loved me, so it was fine”, she reassured me. Another sophomore looked back on an assignment requiring you to film a video of exercise. Instead of actually performing the workout routine, he simply recorded himself doing a single burpee and looped it.
Life was more complicated yet somehow also simpler because life wasn’t so “on the go”. No time was allocated to transportation, we barely engaged in extra curriculars/sports (if any), and classes assigned less homework to help alleviate stress. I was essentially done with all of my responsibilities by 3pm and had 6 hours to do whatever the heck I wanted. If I wanted to spend 5+ hours baking an intricate 2-tiered cake, I could. If I wanted to spend hours writing stories about made up characters, I could. If I wanted to pick up new hobbies like painting, knitting, gardening, playing guitar, I could. Now I can’t remember the last time I baked a cake, or picked up a guitar, or really done any of the hobbies I accumulated during the pandemic.
It was extremely painful to be away from people my age for so long, but with our pandemic ingenuity, we found ways around that. A grade wide discord formed, and we were ALWAYS talking. We did group calls while we did homework and would take turns picking music. We would plan calls at 11pm at night to watch rated R horror films and stay on the call while we were brushing our teeth at 1am because we were scared to be alone after watching a movie that was definitely not appropriate for our age (people in my grade were 11/12 years old).
I think it was in those small moments and spaces where the real nostalgia stemmed from. We started to desensitize from all of the tragedies happening around us and we forced ourselves to slow down and enjoy the little things- because they were all we had. It was in baking too many loaves of banana bread, watching old movies, messing with our teachers in online school, and being on FaceTime with friends 20 hours a day where the joy could be found. We were so far apart, so we had to find ways to keep each other close. We had to initiate and take the opportunity to reach out to old friends and rekindle old friendships.
Just because we have less time in our days now does not mean we have to leave everything we did in quarantine in the past. The next time we have a long weekend, take time to revisit a hobby that you left back in 2020. Maybe reach out to an old friend, make plans to hang out. Bake some banana bread or make some whipped coffee. We do not need to be locked at home to let ourselves have free time. We do not need to be forcibly separated from our friends to reach out to them. We can do all of that stuff right now.
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