A student shares her perspective on Covid-era schooling
By Hiba Khan
March/April 2022
It felt like I had never left.
My first year in high school was online last year, and surprisingly it wasn’t as bad as you’d think it would be. Except for midterms and finals, we were cruising. It was an easy routine to fall back on. Home-cooked meals during English class and fuzzy pajamas below webcams were more than enough for me to feel comfortable.
And then they announced that we were going back in person, full-time, for the 2021-22 school year. Classmates and friends celebrated our return, but my first feeling was something else: fear.
I’ve always been afraid of a lot of things — fire, heights, scary stories and, at one point, even squirrels. But now my biggest fear is bringing Covid home or unknowingly spreading it to fellow students and teachers. Causing people to get sick without realizing it. I used different methods to deal with my former fears. For example, for natural disasters and storms I would watch the weather channel to learn how to be prepared for the worst.
So, that became my philosophy for fears: preparation and prevention.
When school started, they assured us that we would be safe and that precautionary measures would ensure a minimal spread of the virus. I fell back on preparation and prevention: extra masks and hand sanitizer in my bag, double-masking at school and regularly disinfecting my belongings.
They told us to wear masks, use hand sanitizer and wash our hands often. But nobody really cared. Half the class wore their masks below their noses, and sometimes so would the teachers.
“I just can’t breathe, it’s so hot in here,” they’d say, before dropping the strings of their masks behind their ears. “It’s just so annoying to wear these, isn’t it?”
The hallways were even worse. Every class would pile on up next to each other, removing any breathing room left between the classrooms. I dreaded going to my locker, because I knew people would crowd around one another and act as if it were early 2020 again.
Since being online last year opened plenty of resources for us to use, we are now allowed to bring our laptops into school or borrow one. This usually leads to texting during classes and teachers calling out students for laughing at their screens in the middle of a math problem. During lunch, female students don’t shy away from sticking their earbuds up their hijabs and watching Netflix in the classroom with the chill teacher, or even buying themselves their next Amazon purchase from the comfort of the chemistry lab.
Aside from those activities, laptops have become extremely useful for classes in which teachers ask students to fact-check or that are lecture-based with teachers speaking faster than I can write. I take digital notes for every class now, except for Arabic and math. We submit almost all our classwork and homework online, so it makes studying a whole lot easier.
Something I really missed about in-person school was the clubs and organizations. Last year I joined the Mock Trial team, and online meetings were not the greatest. This year, we split our meetings up during the week with a combination of Zoom and gatherings in one of the classrooms after school. The variety keeps us engaged, and it’s so much easier to bounce ideas off each other.
Soccer was another aspect. My team hasn’t been playing in our regular league this year, but some of my teammates and I enjoy messing around with a ball during gym class and reminiscing on that last soccer practice the day before school shut down in 2020. The boys’ team managed an undefeated season in the fall, and cheering them on in the worst weather felt like everything high school should be.
But remember that fear? It came back.
After a few months of in-person school, cases started popping up. Most of them were in elementary school, but I had teachers, classmates and fellow club members who had children and siblings in the classes that were sent home to quarantine. It didn’t make any sense to me why we still passed by one another in classes and hallways.
“Did you hear that so-and-so tested positive?” consistently became the first thing I heard every day … until one day, they sent us an email saying that we might have been exposed by a peer who tested positive. They said we could return to school without hesitation, and we were recommended to get tested.
I panicked. I requested to participate in school via Zoom until I had my own test done to limit the possible spread. My request was rejected.
And now they’re requiring tests before we return from winter break. To give us enough time to get tested, our first week back at school is online.
Ironically enough, we laughed when we found out. One week online, or another two years? We were told to take all of our books home, “just in case.”
Preparation and prevention. It all came back to fear. Fear of high school and fear of the virus. Fear of the future. Fear of the unknown.
Hiba Khan is a high school sophomore from New Jersey. She enjoys reading, playing sports, and practicing piano.