3 Things I’ve Noticed Working In Schools During COVID-19
The terrifying reality that some kids may never recover
Although I’m not a newbie to the education sphere, I’ve finally started working in an actual school with an actual lanyard and I’m called by my last name. It was one thing to tutor for 5+ years or do ESL teaching practice. It’s also another thing to be an educator during COVID-19 times. It’s also another another thing to walk around schools in belonging to the state that’s now booked city who has been in lockdown the longest.
Alas, here are 3 things I’ve noticed working in schools during COVID-19:
#1 / Students have lost even more of their already shortened attention span.
One of the reasons TikTok — and Vine before it — blossomed is that kids can assume mass amounts of media in short bursts. Nevermind that they’re on it for three hours; it doesn’t feel like it because the videos are only a few seconds long. Thus, to now a child, sitting through a 45 minute online lesson seems like a mountain of a challenge. Generationally, our attention span has stedaily declined. With lockdown, it’s become worse. I hear “school sucks” and “I hate this” and when I try and be upbeat and ask that “how can you hate learning new things?” The response I get is “but I’m not learning, we just stare at a screen.”
#2 / It’s the constant change of lockdown to not lockdown to back into lockdown to extending a lockdown which has made it all the more worse.
Even teachers are sick of this. I can understand the snap-lockdown due to numbers increasing. Yet, standing in a eerily silent staff room as everyone stares at the TV where a live press conferences announces we will once again only be allowed out of our house to walk and buy groceries is downright terrifying. That day, Preps were crying because we couldn’t answer their question of “how long will we have to stay at home?”
The constant turn around of waiting every week to see if we can resume normal life severely depleted anyone’s ability to remain positive and ‘make the most out of this time we’ll never get back!’ since that’s what got us through 2020. A year later and we’re back to square one, this time without an end date in sight and jarring periods of freedom.
#3 / Some kids will never recover.
And this is perhaps the most frightening. School is important not just for it being where we learn basic math and TEEL paragraph formats — it’s where children navigate the crucial moments of psychological development. It’s where they learn time how to socialise with other people — with the other sex — and how to cooperate in group settings. As well as developing time management, ability to follow and stay on task and discovering what are their natural born skills, students also go through experiences that shape their morals and values, they learn how to stand up for themselves and look at themselves as a person in this world and what they want to do in it.
A co-worker of mine said that her great-niece who is unable to go to childcare because her parents are essential workers gets so overwhelmed when she sees more than two children. This is in comparison to her other great-nephew who is just fine because his mother is a nurse and can attend. “But it’s okay because they take Lexi to the park where she can be around other kids, you know?”
I do. I’ve seen kids who would’ve otherwise continued on to graduate drop out because they see no point continuing. My own nephew has nightmares of getting sick and my sister is thinking he might need therapy for it later on in life. I’ve sat on Zoom and Teams calls where students don’t respond to teachers — or even to each other — because it’s a screen with a camera and it’s weird and we’ve pretty much forgotten how to talk to each other about anything non-COVID-19 related.
The end result?
There isn’t an easy fix to this. That is, if there a way we can ever fix this. I’ve lost count of how many ‘welcome back students!’ well-being sessions teachers have run from when we’ve come out of another lockdown. I don’t know if there’ll ever be enough. It’s pessimistic, yes, but we do have to face the reality that two years of lockdown has severely impacted the youth of this generation. I’m in my twenties and I’ve felt it. Imagine being a child going through school like this.
The next time we complain about how children act, that they don’t care about anything anymore… let’s take a minute to remember what they went for two years. And how it’s affected them more than we can ever know — or hope to reconcile.
