Everyone has their own experiences with school, I personally did not like school growing up. Many people have very happy memories and enjoy pushing themselves to get good grades. My own experience was hard in the sense of me not getting good enough grades and disappointing my mother. Certain teachers also played a part in my disliking of school because instead of pushing me to do better they could care less about me or my struggles in their class. However, there was a pandemic that occurred and shut schools down for a year and a half. It played a huge part in changing my own views on education because it changed it completely.
Disappointing my mother was one of the saddest things I could do. My single mother, who works a 9 to 5 job every day to provide for me and my sister. My mom does whatever she needs to do in order for us to be healthy, happy, and successful. I would be having a hard time in my classes like English. I would not complete my assignments properly and fail tests and it would show in my grades and I would go home and get lectured of course but behind all the anger being shown, I knew that she was overwhelmed and sad for me. Every mother just wants her child to be amazing in this world and to be content and happy. My mother doesn’t ask me for much, she asks me for the bare minimum so it truly breaks me when I add on to her stress and overwhelming emotions. If the education system was more kind and understanding I would have been able to excel as a student.
Some teachers don’t deserve to teach. In middle school, my English teacher was very strict and I was failing the class and I needed to begin tutoring, and even with the extra time doing work I still had a very low grade. This was because my teacher didn’t put in the grades for extra work I had done to pass the marking period. So even after all the work, I’d don’t I still failed the marking period. High school was a different experience I would say the worst experience. In my junior year of high school, the year the pandemic started but this was before the pandemic. My English teacher was very disliked by a lot of people. He would shame students for normal things in front of large groups of peers on purpose. This individual would find pleasure out of belittling his students and enjoying watching his students crumble and he would kick them while they were already down. However, my experience that really genuinely shocked me when it happened was the parent-teacher conference when he spoke to my mom. Before the conference, he had asked me to do a certain assignment to pass the marking period and I ended up not doing it, but he had entered the passing grade beforehand. Now although I was in the wrong in that situation during the conference he was asking me for a “thank you”, and just speaking directly to me when he was supposed to be speaking to the parent. My mom kept telling him to speak to her instead of me because she saw how he was just trying to get a reaction from me but I was composing myself and staying quiet because I was in the wrong. He just began bad-mouthing me to her and saying that I was his worst student just to spite her. It worked they were arguing during the conference and that had shown me that that man was not teaching material he couldn’t even be professional or respectful to a student’s parent let alone any of his students. I eventually got out of the class later on in the year.
In the first half of 2020, the coronavirus started infecting everyone It seemed to like it came out of nowhere and everything just got shut down and we were all put into what was supposed to be a short-lived quarantine. The regular school became a thing of the past and online was the only option. At first, I was stoked about just being home and not having to leave my house every morning for school. Being able to relax during classes and not have to take them seriously because the teachers were very lenient when it came to handing in work late or having incomplete assignments. The google meets would be filled with students that were either not paying attention or sleeping, I was also a part of this. Eventually, I started to miss what I used to dislike which was spending my days at school. I can say with utmost certainty that the pandemic changed my views on education for the better.
