COVID-19. A real pain in the ass for my sophomore year of high school. Going back and forth from in-person to Zoom. Schools couldn’t make up their mind. Class of 2020 missed prom, and homecoming, and don't even get me started with how much student athletes missed. 

13 March 2020. Seventh period. “Hello, students. Hope you have a wonderful spring break with family and friends. Be safe and see you soon!” Never did I think those two weeks would turn into the world falling apart. I just wanted my sophomore year to be over and have a relaxing summer, or so I thought. The world was running out of toilet paper and bread. Walmart went from being open twenty-four hours to “Sorry, we close at 10 p.m.” Highways, restaurants, schools, and gyms—everything but the hospitals was empty. Our world turned upside down. 

During the first week of online schooling, nobody took it seriously. Some students treated the time like summer, not doing any work, and some dropped high school altogether. I personally still submitted all my work. I just put in the least amount of effort. It wasn't our fault that teachers couldn't entirely fail us. In English, we had hour-long zooms over information that was just repeated from the beginning of the year. To pass time most of our teachers would play certain scenes in movies and have us write an essay over “What was the message being told?” or “How could this have gone another way?” Teachers had to change their whole curriculum for us and didn't know how to teach us behind a camera. My mom is a high school Spanish teacher, and I would hear all the complaints being made by parents, other teachers, and administrators. She went on and on about not knowing how to use Canvas or not knowing how to create a Zoom meeting for her class. To be honest I was doing more work helping my mom than trying to finish my own. But it's not like my work needed much attention. 

After a whole summer of being in a pandemic, we all had to drag ourselves out of bed to start a new school year. For the last four months school was just there and not really a necessity. At the start of my junior year, we went hybrid. Our school set up our schedule by last name to determine when we would go to school. Last names beginning with A-M went Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday everyone was online, then N-Z went Thursday and Friday. I finally loved having a last name that started with a B. I got a four-day weekend. But didn't everyone? After a month of doing that lovely mess, parents started complaining that it wasn't fair to the students who had school at the end of the week. I didn't understand why since they had the beginning of the week off. To please everyone, our district decided to go completely online until winter break. 

Once the school year hit the second semester, the district decided it was safe to come back in person full-time. I didn't know it was up to them to tell us it was safe when the CDC said otherwise. But we lived in Middle of Nowhere, Missouri, so I guess it was fine. A few months go by, we were finally getting to the final stretch of school. Two weeks till summer. So close to being out of this tornado. Then deja vu. “Hello, students. Your student council here. We want to say good luck to everyone. Yes, we are getting out two early. Have a wonderful summer!”

I looked at my friend and then we both looked at our teacher and our teacher looked right back at us, even more confused. What scared us the most is that our own teacher didn’t know what was going on but our student council did. There's no way they canceled two weeks before school ended, again. After all the work we put into studying for our finals. It was only the fifth period but we were dismissed. Just like that, I was a senior. 

My senior year started off great. Had homecoming. Had Friday night football games. Had senior prom. And most importantly I had a real graduation, not over Zoom. Class of 2022 didn't have it so nice and dandy, but we did have a lot of “breaks.”