‘Alone and unmotivated’: A neurodivergent high school student on two years of pandemic learning
Editor’s Note: This op ed is part of Fast Company Spark, a new initiative for middle and high school readers.
As Fast Company covers the future of education, including parent and teacher perspectives, we thought it was important to take a look at how two years of pandemic education is impacting the next generation.
When middle school got hard, I used to entertain the notion of home-schooling. I wouldn’t have to deal with the rush of school’s get-up-and-go, and I could stay home with my mom! No gossip, no inane drama, just me and my family. This disappeared as I transitioned into high school and I met more like-minded people, but the experience of virtual school from March of 2020 to the end of the 2021 school year has killed it twice over.
I’m a junior in high school and almost 17 now, but I was a freshman when everything shut down. I feel like I lost a year’s worth of education, many of my friendships, and my sense of what normalcy was.
High school isn’t easy for a lot of kids, but it can be especially difficult for neurodivergent teenagers and those with learning disabilities like me. I have a 504 Plan (a written plan for students with disabilities who need some classroom and learning modifications), and with hard work I can succeed and thrive in an in-person classroom. But online learning changed the entire landscape for me.
When you have a reduced attention span to begin with, on-screen class makes learning extremely difficult if not impossible. I felt as if the classes had nothing to do with me. Although my counselor is great, it was harder to get support from her because we were no longer in the same building and she was overwhelmed with the needs of so many students. It was difficult to have private conversations with teachers or to ask them for help because it took way more effort than just stopping by in person after class. I couldn’t get myself to do it. I felt alone and completely unmotivated. I am usually a high-achiever, so this made me feel bad about myself.
Online school was hard on both the teachers and students. In the world of Zoom, my teachers were forced to speak to themselves, awaiting answers that often never came and seeing only black boxes instead of faces. Everyday I had to find motivation to get out of bed and put in my earbuds. Instead of joking with my friends and learning hands-on, I was just listening to boring webinars multiple times a day, five days a week, for an entire school year. Why listen when I could just tune out? No one would be the wiser if I went back to bed. There was just me and the screen.
This school year, I was looking forward to some sense of normalcy with the return to in-person, but none of it feels the same. Now we’re back in person, but this comes with its own set of problems. The pandemic is by no means over, and it feels like there’s a new surge every other month. It reminds me of the night after a heavy snowstorm and the subsequent wondering if school will be canceled in the morning. But now we live with this uncertainty every day. Will school be virtual or in person today? We are allotted six snow days each school year, and we used them all before the first semester even ended, and none were for snow. The random closures have been because of constant staff shortages and high numbers of COVID cases.
When we are in person, I never know if all my teachers will even be there. A day with four substitute teachers is not unheard of. Will my bus show up to get me to school? Bus routes in my district are being eliminated or altered on very short notice, with 20 routes being suspended as a result of the current surge and staff shortages. How much education am I losing because of all this? I wonder how all the learning loss and how my pass/fail grades from the 2020-2021 year will affect my college odds.
It would be easier if I was always surrounded by friends, or at least acquaintances, but I’m not. Every day, I walk into a building full of strangers. The freshmen and sophomores look to me like the seventh and eighth graders they were before lockdown. And in some ways, even my class feels like we are still freshmen. We’ve missed rites of passage that normal high school students experience. The long periods of isolation make it hard to reach out to the friends I do have. This perpetuates a sort of cycle that ends up with me feeling friendless and lonely. Sure, it’s a relief to be near them again, but I still feel isolated and anxious. I’ve noticed I bounce my leg so much of the day that it hurts. It’s safe to say I feel a little unstable.
I’ve been performing since I was a kid; being on stage has always been part of my life. Suddenly, that wasn’t an option anymore. The school musical was postponed in 2020 due to COVID and has now been postponed once again, after months of rehearsals singing through masks. I did choir online, sitting alone in my room. I sang alone, to the screen, hearing only the voice of my instructor instead of the rest of the choir. I hoped that the return to in-person learning this fall would fix this, but it hasn’t. I never used to get anxious about performing, but now, after such a long time spent away from the stage, I do.
There’s also fear of the sickness itself. My school has been doing a pretty good job of masking up and getting vaccinated, with only a few outliers, but it hasn’t stopped the spread as much as we hoped. Maybe this isn’t so lucky, but my family was already hit with COVID, so that and my being triple-vaxxed together makes me personally feel safe. It doesn’t mean I don’t worry, but it could be so much worse.
I keep wondering; when will this be done? Maybe this is just something we’re going to have to live with. Maybe I won’t get to see my classmates’s mouths move when they talk for a very long time. Maybe something will come up and we’ll be back to virtual for the long haul. Maybe more days will be canceled and they’ll have to extend the school year. What if this continues into my senior year? I’m coping by throwing myself into the college application process, trying to make the future feel more real. I haven’t had a normal high school experience, but at least I can hope for a normal college experience.
Eva Klayman is a junior in high school in southeast Michigan with interest in the arts. They sing in an extracurricular a capella group and participate in theater and choir.
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