Just over five years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. Despite the quarantine being half a decade ago, students are still feeling the ramifications today.
Students and staff returned to the building full-time in the fall of 2021, and over the last four years, everyone has had to tackle the transition from extremely limited social interaction to active learning and face-to-face instruction. After becoming so used to “asynchronous Mondays” and an unwavering understanding from teachers about late assignments, the adjustment to in-person expectations was not easy for many students.
“I definitely felt a little bit behind,” senior Michael Pesentheiner said. “Especially in math, because it was so hard for me to learn online. Freshman and sophomore year took a lot of adjusting because I felt like I had to relearn so many skills that I should’ve learned in middle school.”
COVID-19 hit when current seniors were in their 7th grade year, making their first official year back in the classroom freshman year. The end of middle school is generally when students will start to refine more advanced writing strategies, enroll in higher level math courses, and prepare for the heavier workload they would receive once in high school, all things that online schooling could not replicate.
Students’ collaborative skills were also put at risk during the months online, and many teachers grappled with the attempt at getting students involved and excited about school again after returning from quarantine.
“There was a quick, ‘Yay, I’m back to being in person,’’” social sciences teacher Jennifer Synder said. “But then [students] went back to not wanting to work together, not wanting to learn together. I would tell everyone to get in groups to discuss, and there would just be dead silence.”
On top of the struggle to socially re-engage and the lack of typical academic skills, the longest lasting effect of COVID-19 has been the loss of work ethic and academic integrity among students. Part of this likely came from the loosening of grading policies that was introduced post-COVID-19. Teachers were much more understanding of the circumstances for completing work, and policies were altered to allow for easier grading and a greater allowance of late work.
“It’s frustrating as a teacher because you have students who do their work on time and they get the grades. Then you have others who are not doing that, but because of our policy, they can still get the same grade,” government teacher Amy McCall said. “And that’s just not how real life works, there are deadlines. And there is some room for those deadlines–I know things happen– but it’s just causing kids to procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate.”
After months of continuous technological advancements over the course of online school, many students also became scarily familiar with using outside—and unnecessary—resources to help them complete their schoolwork. With Google just one tab away and no monitoring from a teacher, it was practically effortless to receive an A in most classes.
This trend of indolence did not stop once the masks came off, however, and the threat of academic dishonesty has become increasingly prevalent with the rise of AI tools. Not only do students not have to solve their own math problems, they can receive pages of writing or research curated to a class rubric within seconds.
“While it is designed to be a tool that can be helpful, it is ultimately lazy,” English teacher Jessica Cimino said. “I think particularly at the level that I’m teaching, and the type of writing that I want students to do, it takes a lot of the fun part of English class, which is thinking and processing our own ideas and putting them into writing, and it takes that out.”
Although it may seem like teachers are AI’s biggest enemy, many students also have issues with the unfairness that generating answers brings to the school environment.
“I think that it’s making our generation a lot more lazy, and making people not have any work ethic,” senior Alexa Ganey said. “It’s especially frustrating because a lot of people will take all of these hard classes, and they’ll do well in them, but it’s because they’re using AI and not their brain. And when you think about it, people have been going to school without AI for years, and they were fine, so we should be fine without it.”
The reverberations of COVID-19 and online school have been a learning curve for everybody, and it is important that people continue to adjust in ways that aren’t detrimental to their education.
