Quarantine and distance learning was, to many people, something they could plow through and forget it’s even affecting their daily life. But to others they know quarantine was depressing and lonely, and that it was still affecting them in social settings or at school.
Jaimie Garcia, a sophomore at SLHS, expresses a difficulty that quarantine brought too many: strains in friendships. Garcia expresses that she was too shy to interact with others.
“I didn’t interact with friends as much anymore, it was like I couldn’t interact anymore.”
With quarantine in the way with everything, friendships were harder to take care of. Garcia voices the hardship of communicating with friends even through text.
“Since we’re so distant you can’t see expressions and expressing yourself through text was hard. You had to use emojis… You can’t say it out loud.”
But there was a positive to come out of quarantine for Garcia: a tighter bond with her brother.
When I asked her the question, “Did you become closer with any family members?” she replied, “More so my [younger] brother more than anyone else… When school was over we’d just play games and stuff.”
And of course when quarantine started, distance learning started. Many had their academic life gravely affected. For Garcia, and for almost everyone, she says her phone was her biggest distraction and that math and science were impacted the most during distance learning.
“[Before distance learning, studying] was steady… now I can’t study because I’m not used to school.”
Garcia says that even though she used to be a quiet student before quarantine, she believes she’s even more quiet now, “because quarantine really messed me up.”
The way learning has shifted during distance learning really impacted Garcia. She says that it’s become weird how before you had to basically teach yourself and now you actually have someone to teach you.
“Teachers would say “Do the work now” and they let you out of the zoom classroom, and now it’s like there’s a teacher watching over you, you can ask for help now, so it’s weird.”
With all the changes students had to go through, the only thing we can do is try to become a better human being and see the positive side in something extremely negative, because if we don’t we could get caught up in that negativity.
