The Class of 2024 has it rough.

The summer of 2019 ended happily. I started my eighth grade year with a smile. The year goes by and the eighth graders are talking about going to high school. 2020 seemed like it was going to be a great year. “Yo Noelle let me get a waterfall” Eli yells from across the classroom. I threw him my ice tea like usual and he had some like usual. I leave school with a smile without knowing that I will never be returning. Summer of 2020 ended quietly. I started my freshman year with lost eyes.

2020 made it hard to be a freshman. We had no transition into our ninth grade year. We went from being around all of our friends to staring at a screen in a room alone. Most of us were never going to see those friends again. The hybrid system didn’t really help; the internet would go out, barely anyone would learn anything. According to the article The 6 things we’ve learned about how the pandemic disrupted learning by Cory Turner “Much of that missed learning, Kane says, was likely a hangover from spring 2020, when nearly all schools were remote and remote instruction was at its worst.” With all of this we were still alone, but the summer of 2021 ended with hope.

Fall of 2021 was a lost memory even though it was a struggle. No faces to be seen;  everyone in school was still behind masks.   According to the article Mental health and the pandemic, : what U.s. surveys have found by John Gramlich While “around half of K-12 parents said the first year of the pandemic had a negative emotional impact on their kids, a larger share (61%) said it had a negative effect on their children’s education.” (date accessed) Being back in school gave us a sense of normalcy. Teens around the world were all afraid to interact with each other and were behind in our education. Even through all of this we bonded over these hard years we were looking towards 2022 with a smile. We found the yellow brick road.

2022 was looking good. I was nervous for eleventh grade. I felt so behind. My junior year was shaky like a lot of my fellow classmates. I gave up in the middle of the year. I almost failed all of my classes. Bastian Betthäuser, an author of the paper and researcher at the Sciences Po Centre for Research on Social Inequalities in France and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom stated that “Children still have not recovered the learning that they lost out on at the start of the pandemic,” he said. He aAlso stated that, “education inequality between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds increased during the pandemic. So the learning crisis is an equality crisis. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds were disproportionately affected by school closures.”. I do feel that I lost a lot of time to learn and I lost a sense of hard work. I skated through freshman and, sophomore year because of Covid. So I knew that I had to get through this. I wanted to go to college and graduate. According to “The Tenney School, they take a whole-student approach to learning. They identify potential learning gaps and scaffold those vital skills that students need to achieve academic success in the future. This includes one-on-one instruction that helps solve individual learning challenges. It also makes it so that students are able to ask questions in a low-pressure environment. We also help erase many of the problems of poor socialization.” I found that this really helped me being able to talk to my teachers and get help one on one. It made me more confident in my work and it made me a better learner and I can’t wait for senior year.