When my advisor sent the registration form for face-to-face classes back in late January, I answered them in a daze. At the time, it didn’t really sink in that I’d be seeing my classmates in real life when I’ve known them strictly by pixels on a video call or emoji-filled texts for the past two years. I’ve met some of them before but never on a daily basis, and I was unsure how classes with them would pan out. Our already-graduated seniors had mournfully commented that we had missed so much as the first fully-online senior batch: CGS, prom, cultural shows, and more. In the week before classes, the realization hit me: I’d finally see my friends after years of being apart. But how will the classroom dynamic change with Hybrid Virtual Online Learning and Teaching (HyVOLT) classes?
It’s an understatement to say that the first year of the pandemic was a rough one. Everyone was experiencing some form of loss, loneliness, or anxiety. Even when I didn’t have COVID, I felt exhausted and demotivated. Without the physical barrier of a school environment, I felt like I had little excuse to not be in work mode 24/7 when I could easily access my laptop. I thought it was a bonus to multitask during classes, too, and I’d often do other schoolwork as my teachers lectured. If I wasn’t multitasking, I was scrolling through my social media feeds or getting distracted by something else.
Yet even with the pressure to perform, by the end of 2020, I felt like there was no incentive to keep that performance consistent, especially with how draining the seven-hour synchronous class time was. It was easy to skip morning classes and oversleep for a few more hours or pass out from lunch to dinner during school days. It was stressful to catch up with lessons for exams, sure, but my report card was barely complaining. There was simply no point in putting in the effort. The only thing that pulled me together was how my friends reached out and told me they were worried about me. Seeing them work hard inspired me to do better.
For face-to-face classes, we had to submit several forms saying we were interested in joining HyVOLT and prove we were vaccinated for COVID-19. We signed a waiver to be allowed on campus and registered for permanent gate passes so we could be allowed out the campus immediately after classes. Afterwards, we were emailed our room numbers in Munich Campus, a protocol handbook, a link to a Zoom meeting for a thorough community briefing, and our digital gate passes. It was weird seeing my tenth-grade picture on my twelfth-grade ID. The person in the photo hadn’t changed nor did they ever worry about things like a year full of global issues that kept on coming. But I had.
When I walked onto Munich Campus, I was surprised by how much had changed. They had set up sinks in the drop-off zone awnings where we were meant to line up and wash our hands in before getting into the school. The guards said we’d use them next week, but we never did. We only had to scan the QR Code for a health disclosure form or write it out manually if you were running late or the school internet was going AWOL again.
Inside Munich, I saw rows of chairs in the lobby and noted the automatic alcohol dispensers and yellow guide markers pasted on the floor. To the side was a proud tarpaulin poster announcing that the physical set-up was government-approved. They’d converted a kindergarten classroom to an isolation room for those who were suddenly ill. I wonder if they ever ended up using it. I’d have investigated but I was too distracted by the fact the inner lobby had changed into fairyland décor and it wasn’t the blue rubber sunken pit that I had once loved. I muttered, “Why do the kids get everything?” as I trudged up the ramp to the second-floor classroom that had been prepared for our arrival.
From Munich to Luxembourg, the school was intensely prepared for HyVOLT classes. They had outfitted each classroom with a large digital screen to display our classmates stuck at home, nine or ten of the large senior high school desks for our laptops, three computer cameras to display various angles of the room, an alcohol dispenser, a box of surgical masks, and even a sanitation box hooked up to an air purifier that left things put in it smelling like the pungent sterility of a hospital hallway. I was used to the smell of clinical sanitation since I always visited hospitals even before the pandemic, but my teachers would jokingly wrinkle their noses when referring to the box at the far wall.
There were only less than eight of us in my class attending face-to-face but we’re already a handful. We can’t seem to stop talking. Even those who were quiet in online classes would gab on and on, saying it felt easier to be understood when talking face-to-face than over call or text, where what they said could be mistaken for sarcasm, rudeness, or disinterest. I got closer to people who I thought I wouldn’t ever get close to in online classes. During recess, we’d huddle together and share our snacks, dance or sing, and take photos. During the two-hour lunch break, we have to get home for the additional one-hour afternoon class, we’d linger and eat together off-campus.
Because of this level of socialization, I would be torn between paying attention to lectures and turning my head to reply to a conversation with one of my seatmates. Sometimes, our lectures would be interrupted by unexpected internet outages on-campus. We once spent an hour struggling to connect back to the class call because of one of these Wi-Fi blackouts. That’s not to say everything was bad: we finally got to talk conversationally with our teachers, write on actual worksheets, and be active in class discussions. It was refreshing after how many months of trawling in between Google apps.
It’s safe to say that face-to-face classes didn’t magically improve my performance as a student. One could say it added more challenges to studying in a pandemic, due to the added distraction of having classmates around fighting for your attention and the lack of Internet in the school stopping us from accessing documents online. Many students opted out of HyVOLT after trying it for a few weeks, with whole classes reportedly not showing up on campus for their scheduled meetings. While online classes aren’t perfect, they’re way more convenient than physical classes.
Physical classes are kind of insane if you think about it: people are coming together in groups in the continuation of a contagious pandemic that hasn’t been kept on a leash, with more infectious variants appearing every month. It goes against whatever survival instinct says.
So, why do I keep going?
I’ve been attending online classes since the last term of tenth grade in early 2020. My batch has missed out on the highlights of senior year because of the pandemic. In spite of this, the pandemic didn’t stop us from connecting. Seeing my classmates in real life makes classes more bearable and senior high more grounded in reality. The only event that is in our cards at this point is a face-to-face graduation, with a handful of get-togethers from then and now with each other before we part and take our separate paths to our future.
The pandemic stole a lot of things from us as a class, but it won’t steal our last few months together. At this point, we won’t let it.
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