COVID-19 Through The Eyes of a Student

Read about the COVID-19 experience through the eyes of our Co-op student Gwendolyn as she discusses how her home life and school life has changed during the pandemic.

By Gwendolyn Grimoldby, CO-OP student at the Archives/high school student

I would have never imagined in my whole life that I would be living through a pandemic. Everything is looking so different and must be done differently, especially with school right now. For my school they have it set so we go to the school for half the week and the other half is online. When we are in the school building, we must wear our masks all the time except when it's lunchtime and we are eating. While eating at lunch we always have the same seat, I can't move from it, we also have to sign in and out for the bathrooms.

Now, there are some positive sides of school during COVID-19. For my school, we are doing one class at a time so you can put more effort or concentration on each class, which is a plus for me. However, being in grade 12 there are also a lot of downsides of COVID-19 during school - like not having group graduation, and probably no prom; those are things that you look forward to and we just don't get to experience because of COVID.

Right now, we are doing online learning only because Ontario is on lockdown. Online schooling is pretty good in my eyes because nowadays we're so used to just using the internet and using technological devices that it's sometimes easier to do the work online. Also, when you're in your own house working, you're comfy and you can just lay back and do your work. But there are downsides to working at home and doing online schooling. One of the downsides from my point of view is, I'm not motivated enough to do my schoolwork and get stuff done because I'm in my house - not in a building that's meant for school. I work in my bedroom, meant for relaxing and sleeping, so it's hard to get the work done. Also, with doing classes online it can be tricky because some classes are easy to do online, like Business or English, but some classes are tricky to do online, like Art or Photography, because you're not getting the hands-on help you need or the physical time in class. You have to work on things alone and communicating through email with teachers can be more difficult than communicating in person.

One of the classes that I found both easy and tricky with online learning is Co-op because a lot of the work that we do in class is all online, so it's easy in that sense, but being placed and trying to find a placement is the tricky part. You must do all of the Co-op work online for the most part and you don't get the same knowledge that you would if you were inside the buildings and working with the staff at your Co-op. So, in my opinion Co-op is a class that easy to do online but also, in some ways, hard to do online.

In my own time, the pandemic hasn't affected me too much because I'm normally in my house or going for walks so I'm not around a lot of people and I can still do those things. But one of the things I can’t do during lockdown while social distancing at home is seeing my friends, which really sucks because you need that in-person relationship and interaction, so we don’t go insane and feel isolated. But I’m grateful for the internet as we are able to FaceTime and talk through there so it helps. COVID-19 changed my life for good and for bad, but altogether my experience with COVID-19 hasn't been too bad. One thing I really want to do when COVID is all over and we go back to normal life is to go camping with my family and friends and just spend time with them. I also want to be able to travel and see the world.