Over the past 10 months society has been swallowed up in this tsunami called Covid, and as everyone knows the students of the world have been locked away and forced into an impersonal, harsh, shadow of their reality. As one of the misfortunate students, I would like to share my experiences over the past two lockdowns.
On March 12, 2020, we were sent home for what was initially a two-week lockdown, little did we know we would not set foot in school until the following September. Remote learning was a very new and foreign idea to most of us, and I spent the first few weeks of lockdown on many late-night group facetime calls and Xbox parties.
Throughout the first lockdown there was fad upon fad and trend upon trend to keep us afloat and a sense of large novelty to the whole thing. And although many people found the lack of sociability and being housebound extremely hard, I found myself in quite the opposite situation. The break was quite helpful, and I came out the other side as a different person. There was a tranquillity across Salthill and a blanket of calmness upon the city centre. I found myself in a frame of mind I had never experienced before, the world was collapsing around me, yet here I was at peace.
As a third year I was a priority, and that meant we were given lots of work by the time remote learning began. Having said that, we did not begin our online classes until after the Easter break, and by that point, I was in no fit shape to learn. I had spent the last four and a half weeks breezing through life, completing futile tasks and sleeping. But still the classes commenced at an hour apiece, they were unnerving because no one wanted to be the first person to speak or be seen with their camera on. Understandably the first few classes were quiet. I did the work I was assigned, in the beginning, that did not last. By the time mid to late April had rolled around I had given up on my education. I refused to believe there would be a Junior Cert, and by the time my suspicions were confirmed I seldom attended a class. Looking back at that, I feel guilty that the teachers were putting in the effort and I gave nothing in return.
They did give us assessments at the end of year, but the plagiarism was at an all-time high which was not surprising. I found myself on various “rewriter” websites and Wikipedia was my best friend. Copy and paste was a regular tool for me. In my head third year finished around April 20. If I am to tell the truth, I would not change that because I made some lifelong friends and discovered some interesting music and writings in the time I should have been listening to teachers tell me about the French revolution or igneous rocks.
This January, lockdown has a very much different energy to it, it is less “time to take care of myself and be the person I want to be” and more “I need to survive this.” I would give anything to go back to March and relive the sunny days and the home workouts, but here we are in January in the rain, snow, and the cold, feeling miserable, so there is not much I can do.
Online schooling has a vastly different feel to it this time around, it feels like more of an escape than something I am trying to escape from, I understand that as a TY student it is easy for me to say that, but the facts are, I am not in school and I am missing trips so all I can do is take it as it comes, roll with the punches as such. It is about keeping the head up this time around. That is much easier said than done though, so the teachers could ease up on the projects and assignments.
Joe Kelly is a transition year student at Coláiste Iognáid.
