Good luck, America. We need it.
I was carrying a Trader Joe’s bag with my history, chemistry and statistics textbooks to the library on last Wednesday of the school year. As far as I could tell, every student, parent volunteer and faculty member had a face mask and maintained social distancing. To limit contact from bidirectional pedestrian traffic, we entered through the main entrance and exited through the gym. It was finals week without final exams. The few minutes I was in the library, though, were no less stressful than finals would have been.
I went to online school for three months and staying in my house was and is lonely. I leave only to go walking or biking along the shadowy, tree-lined mountainous road that brings me to the peak of the nearby hill.
It hasn’t been great eating the same stewed chicken and egg or beef with cabbage and onions for the past three months. What is worse is seeing people only through their text messages. Come to think of it, despite not being able to access certain assignments and documents and in the first week or two, distance learning has run fairly smoothly.
Class time is a lot shorter than the old hour-and-a-half long classes that seemed to drag on forever. I really think working from home with only the occasional buzzing of flies as a distraction and being forced to speak in Zoom’s breakout rooms has made school much more productive than it was before.
My teachers had done so much hard work to keep their classes in shape during quarantine: preparing additional materials ahead of time, developing more online activities that would keep us engaged during class. That’s why I was aghast to find that one of the highest-profile staff members, who would see over 400 students, parents and faculty members over the course of the day, was not wearing a face mask at the textbook dropoff.
On the car ride home, I thought of all the emails I’d received from our principal, who spoke of a “safe environment” in which we continue “sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and washing our hands.” It reminded me vaguely of President Trump, who wears the positive tests of over three million Americans as a “badge of honor” and refuses to wear a mask himself.
I want to believe those who treat the virus seriously are good people at heart. It’s just saddening to see that even my school’s leadership failed to recognize the threat of coronavirus.
Either we all stand together, or we all fall apart. At the moment, I think we’re crumbling.