Items

• 2020-02-24

  The Extended Spring Break, or How COVID Made Senior Year a Let-Down

  I remember talking about the virus beginning to pop up in America in my AP Research class with the rest of class. The nature of the class was an at-your-own-pace kind of deal as long as our research essay and presentation developed accordingly to segmented deadlines. Our teacher loved to talk about current events with us while we worked, and it'd often get a few of us side-tracked for half-an-hour, but this time our whole class was involved. Like many at the time we thought it'd just be a slightly worse flu, that it was something we'd make it through just like all the other flu-seasons from years prior. As it became a more severe problem throughout the nation, we all started to realize that Spring Break may last longer that initially thought. We figured we'd eventually come back with new guidelines in place, but at least for our school district, that was it. The senior-year-experience effectively died their for many of us. Prom got cancelled, Gradbash followed suit, and after holding out for so long, the promise of a graduation ceremony too. We still had the same schedule and school work, but now, many of the fun events and activities were cancelled. School from home still seemed relaxing at the time and had yet to devolve into the "this is like a personal prison" mentality, so there was some positivity that we could hold on to until Summer vacation. I couldn't look past everything falling apart for the year to make myself happy. I've been able to move on since, but seeing your senior year get reduced to ash in a few weeks really took a toll on me for a few months. Now in college, I feel some sense of socially-distanced normalcy has returned to the area I live in, as we don't have a noticeably high amount of cases here, but it still doesn't make me feel that much better of having lost an important year of my life.