It was April of 2020 when I finally got the hang of quarantine.

At the very beginning of quarantine, it was hard to handle the new unfamiliar freedom that distance-learning gave to students. We were not restricted to any time frames, activities, and lectures that school would implement for seven hours straight. With online learning, we were given the ability to interconnect schoolwork with our daily personal schedules and do everything at our own pace. While quarantine seemed like a prolonged spring break at first, it soon became monotonous and repetitive. Every day would blend into the next and school was not taken particularly too seriously around this time.

It was all fun and games until Friday came along. Thursday night, a text: “hey did u do the euro homework yet? it’s a lot of work.” All week long, we were living it up, skimming through assignment details every other day or so, thinking “Hey, this isn’t too bad. I could do this in an hour if I focused.” That night, you look at it more closely and begin stressing out a little, thoughts become too jumbled up to form a clear, coherent one, more and more new tabs are opened to find other assignments due the same next day.

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

It took me a couple weeks before I finally took that first step to stopping my bad habits. That first step, and one of the most important steps for me, was planning out every day of a week at the beginning of the week. Since most of my teachers would post assignments ahead of time, I knew my share of work for the week and distributed a fair amount to each day of the week accordingly. On weeks where I had particularly large amounts of work, specifically April 27 to April 30, I worked every minute and could not let my eyes wander elsewhere. There were to be no distractions. Eating became a chore, a necessity, rather than a luxury where I could savor every single bite while watching Netflix. No more of that was allowed for this single week. Even after doing all of that work, working out and resting gave me time to rejuvenate myself and get out any stress from the day. Funny, because I would have never thought working out was a reward in and of itself, not due to its results, if it wasn’t for quarantine.

Of course, there were a few glitches in the system that I had no control over. A specific one I was not quite fond of was class meetings. As teachers and often parents, they should understand that teenagers will stay up and sleep in if they were given the opportunity to. Of course, quarantine was that opportunity. Less students began attending the meetings after a while because they were too used to their own schedules now that they did not have to be physically there. Not being physically there in a classroom but in the comfort of our own homes did not give us the learning environment we were used to. This could even mean students sleeping during calls and not listening to the teacher at all. While this is very disappointing, teachers should understand that it’s really just the nature of teenagers to rebel.

Based on my experience as a student during these devastating times, I believe that a system should be implemented where equal ratios of students are at home, learning online, or learning in-person. Students can switch off days when they get to go to school and when they stay home. While there can be outside issues that conflict with this solution, it is definitely one to consider with school starting this fall.

Ah, a song that helped me calm down during that one particularly hectic week in April 2020. :’)