Coming out of COVID-19 isolation, I looked forward to making up for many missed social opportunities with friends. I joined the track team at my new school and did well in my events. I made good friends with some of my teammates and other students on campus, which can be challenging for me as a person with autism. When my mom was looking for a church for us to attend, my track coach shared information about his church, and we began attending on Sundays; I also went to a Wednesday church youth group when my study schedule allowed it. Thanks to social media, I could keep in contact with friends from my former school, and I even have a girlfriend who attended my old school.

But despite it being a terrific year for me overall, I feel profound disappointment in the circumstances that led me to South Torrance. Several racially charged events occurred during my middle school years, such as the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery murders and trials. As a result, there were many discussions about race and safety in white communities. In the climate at that time, I expected to be safest with the same people who protested, saying, “Black Lives Matter” and “Stop Killing Our Sons.” I thought the people who said my life matters would believe that my education also matters. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the community, accountability, collaboration and support that was talked about at those 8th grade recruitment meetings during my first semester in a school attended mostly by students of color and run mostly by educators of color.

I found myself in a situation where some teachers were not motivated to teach and help their students succeed, some were bullied by their own students and didn’t know how to discipline the class and some repeated the same lessons and shared the answers before they gave tests and quizzes (and some kids still failed!). When my mom, herself an administrator who has been in education for over 20 years, tried to intervene, it was difficult to impossible to get some teachers to respond or administrators or other top education officials to address the problem. Eventually, she started looking for a new home in a different school district and we moved in December.

South High is a predominantly white and Asian ethnic high school where most of the teaching staff is also primarily white and Asian. They treat their students as I expected a school should, providing counselors, tutoring and “Spartan Seminar.” 

Spartan Seminar is a 25-minute session every Wednesday and Thursday, where students sign up for specific classes to catch up on work, get tutoring from the teacher or study for an upcoming test/quiz with that teacher. If you are not doing well in a class or on an assignment, you are expected to attend Spartan Seminar for that class. 

My Spanish teacher has great classroom control. First, he provides us with study guides (not answers!) for upcoming quizzes. He reviews the homework to ensure we are updated on the current unit’s information. Finally, whenever someone does act up, he raises his voice and tells them to stop, which works, and we immediately return to learning.

My algebra teacher at South High was terrific. She showed the class how to work on new equations, like factoring and polynomials. She has a pleasant personality, making learning enjoyable for everyone in her classroom. She didn’t wait for my mom to email or call her; she often emailed my mom if she had information she thought would help me. My friends all agreed that she is a good teacher, which is unusual for a math class, and some even consider her their favorite teacher. 

I finished the semester at South High with 4 As, 2 Bs, and a C. It took much work, and I sometimes spent as many as six hours a night doing homework to learn the subject. I credit my school team and my mom because they challenged me to communicate with them about when I needed help and they created a schedule to review my work and grades to ensure I was on the right track. I was motivated to work harder at South High because I knew it was expected of me. I did not mind staying at my desk for hours and sometimes sacrificing my sleep to get the grades I knew I could if I tried hard. 

Although this was a great school year, I am disappointed that I had to leave a community I loved to find it. I also don’t want to suggest that my old school was not a good school because it was attended and run predominantly by people of color. I was raised by a Black educator, who cared so much about her students that we still go to their weddings, graduations, sporting and social events years after they were in her class.

If I could go back and talk to the staff at my former school, I would want them to know that:

I want to be valued as someone who takes their work seriously.

I want teachers who take their jobs seriously and hold me accountable. 

I want to look up to my teachers, like what I see, and be like them.

I want them to care enough to know who I am because my life matters to them, for them to see my potential and help me reach my goals.

My African-American peers and I want to be educated by teachers who look like us.

We want to hear their stories. We want to hear how they made it to college. If they go, maybe we can go, too. Tell us about African-American fraternities and sororities, dorms and the fun times they had so we know that college isn’t just boring hard work. We want to hear about their mistakes, so we learn from them. 

We want to know about the problems they faced in predominantly white spaces and how they overcame them so that when we have those experiences, we can overcome them, too. 

We want to talk to them about our experiences as African-American students and know that they understand. We sometimes do not want to “air our family business” to people who may not understand or who already stereotype us because we are African American. They don’t understand our community, language, idioms, values or history. They don’t understand us, no matter how well intentioned or woke they are. 

The teachers are the ones who told us they would do all these things for us and it hurts the most to think they are aware of our unmet expectations. I want them to know that, too.

My goal is not to criticize but to remind them that their students need them. We want them to care about us. Some of their students will only care when they do. We are waiting for them.

A far-reaching study has found Generation Z could shake up the workplace, transforming how it has operated for decades.

The survey of nearly 7,000 13-25-year-olds Gen Z’ers — the nation’s most ethnically and racially diverse generation ever — by the Springtide Research Institute found a majority want work to be meaningful, don’t have a mentor, are worried about work/life balance, and are concerned their gender or racial identity may prevent them from finding work.

“Work is not just going to be a place for work; it’s going to be a place for Gen Z where they make meaning for their whole lives,” said Executive Director Dr. Josh Packard of the study, “Work/Life Helping Gen Z Flourish & Find Balance.”

“One of the big trends that matters is trust, because you’ve got a generation who has now lived through two big recessions fairly close in succession and is also not only the most diverse generation in history but also cares about diversity,” Packard continued.

The two big economic recessions, one in 2008 and the current financial crisis caused by the pandemic, have also fueled the generation’s anxiety, with the oldest and youngest having the biggest concerns.

Many Gen Z’ers also believe their racial or gender identity will influence their search for work; 1 in 5 Gen Z’ers said they will have a hard time finding a job because of their race, and females express less security in their financial lives than their male peers.

The study breaks down three core concepts of mentorship, meaning, and growth in Gen Z’s perspectives of life and work, and what they want out of it.

Mentorship in the workplace is crucial as 82% young people report it’s important their supervisor helps them set performance goals; and 83% say they want their supervisor to care about their life.

Springtide found the experiences of Gen Z’ers is not monolithic, as access to mentorship varies based on racial identity, finding “white young people have more access to mentors in life” than Hispanic/Latino and Black peers and that 60% of the white young people said they knew “someone who listens” compared to 51% of Hispanic and Latino and 41% of Black Gen Z’ers.

The experience of having a mentor in life influences young people’s expectations for a mentor at work. Since Hispanic/Latino and Black Gen Z’ers often have less experience with mentorship than white Gen Z’ers, they don’t carry the same expectations of their supervisors to care for and guide them.

Gen Z has also shown a desire to find value in work and in their lives in general, as 74% of young people claim they want the things they do to have a purpose. Meaning for Gen Z’ers also includes growth, and being able to change as a person, as 87% want a job where they can learn a lot.

While many interpret meaning in different ways, Gen Z believes it needs to not only fulfill themselves but others, as 86% said want to make a difference with their jobs.

In fact, 70% of 13-to-17-year-olds told the Institute they believe work is not worth doing if it is not meaningful to them; and nearly 3 out of 4 young people say what they do as a job is a part of who they are.

Other stats from “work life balance:”

• Over 40% of Gen Z are worried about not being qualified for the work they want to do.
• 47% of 13-25-year-olds are worried about “a lack of good jobs.”
• Only 38% have someone who models good work ethic and healthy relationships.
• 73% of young people say they are more likely to do extra work when they believe in what they are doing.
• 87% of 13-to-25-year-olds believe they are “responsible for making their own meaning at work”

The 74 Million found several Gen Z’ers who echoed the sentiment and findings of the Springtide Institute, in topics such as work and life balance, mentorship, and meaningful work.

Nathan Hall, 21

Campus Attendant at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, Barista

“I am absolutely worried about sacrificing a part of (my) time and hobbies for work. Worried about hours always because New York is expensive. I’m an actor, and my industry is taking a bit of a hit right now. Work to me is whatever can pay rent and get enough money to get by, it’s unfortunate. I wish I could spend more time doing what I actually want to do. But that’s just not how it is.”

Kaylie, 14

Student, Woodrow Wilson Middle School, Clifton, New Jersey

“Some teachers when it comes to certain things, you get attached to them, [like] my sixth grade teacher who I still talk to a lot of the time. He helped me through a lot, transitioning from elementary school to middle school, and especially during the quarantine. When everything went online, it was hard for me to transition, but my relationships with counselors and teachers helped a lot…. to balance everything out with them.”

Carlos Polanco, 22

Graduated Senior, Dartmouth College

“Mentors are important, especially in the workplace. Having people who can stick up for you and people who you can ask questions…It’s also very important when you’re from an underrepresented background, in my experience as someone who is Black and Latinx, there have been very few people who look like me or come from similar backgrounds in places where I worked.”

Yana Gitelman, 18

Rising Freshman, Georgetown University 

I had a teacher in school who is (also) a clinical psychologist… and he told me how a lot of his clients and parents at our school live and work for their vacations. They’re miserable most of the year, and then get a super nice, fancy vacation where they’re happy for two weeks. I want work to feel like fun and not like I’m just like getting through the week to get to the weekends.”

Ethan Siede, 22

Rising Senior Princeton, Microsoft Software Engineering Intern

“I am very passionate about my work, and I don’t think I would want to do something that I wasn’t passionate about. It’s important to balance out work and life, and I think when you’re in your 20’s it’s better if you work a little bit more. But I think there’s only a limit to that, because those who do like 100 hour work weeks, I think that’s just wasting your 20’s.”

Julia Clark, 17

Rising Freshman, Williams College 

“I want work that still makes me excited because I don’t want to have a job that I dread… even if it pays really well. I don’t want to think of it as a job; I want to think of it as a passion that I’m just lucky enough to get paid for.”

It was only Feb. 27, 2020 — a mere 17 months ago — that the first school in the United States due to COVID-19.

Somehow it seems longer in pandemic time.

For students, like everyone else, that temporal elasticity could be chalked up to a host of things, from the monotony of quarantine to isolation from family and friends to the mostly invisible barriers between the spaces where we worked, played and dreamed.

In March 2020, The 74 launched “Pandemic Notebook,” an intimate series designed to capture, in their own words, how students are living through this strange period.

Few understood how long it would last. Initially, it just seemed like Spring Break was taking . But then the goalposts for a return to normalcy kept shifting: the end of the school year, the fall, the conclusion of Biden’s “First 100 Days.”

It still hasn’t happened.

For students in a once-unthinkable year two of pandemic school, the stories deepened as quarantine wore on. Some grappled with young love in a time of virtual connection; others, locked inside their homes, experienced the deep trauma of parental abuse. They faced issues that are perennial: privilege, college and equity, making new friends. They also tried new things. A fifth-grader in Michigan took advantage of learning from home to care for a neighbor’s ducks and chickens. A high school junior in Chicago recommitted to education and his love of physics after a 3 a.m. epiphany watching Neil deGrasse Tyson videos on YouTube. And a New York City senior who scoured her apartment building for a decent Wi-Fi signal discovered something better: her neighbors.

Here are their stories.

‘Returning’ to school

WELCOME TO PANDEMIC SCHOOL, YEAR TWO: For students starting a new school year, there are advantages to going virtual. An extra 45 minutes of sleep, for one. Not having to pack a lunch. Avoiding the disgusting bathrooms that are seemingly impossible to avoid in any building occupied by so many adolescents. But as Sadie Bograd writes, much is lost: “Going back to school simply didn’t feel like much of a meaningful shift after a similarly Zoom-filled and homebound summer.” Her school in Lexington, Kentucky, started the semester entirely online. But as she started school, moving from class to class, or link to link, she found several small reasons to be hopeful. Some teachers adorned their Canvas pages with virtual Bitmoji classrooms, their avatars guiding students to important links. Others went on fascinating tangents and rambling digressions. “In short,” Bograd writes, “my teachers’ personalities managed to come through the small box they occupied on my laptop, reassuring me that even without the possibility of face-to-face interaction, I’ll still be able to make meaningful connections.”

Read Sadie’s story here.

Pain and loss

A GRANDFATHER’S DEATH & A MEDITATION ON COVID’S MENTAL HEALTH TOLL: “The day I found out my grandfather died, I cried so hard I threw up,” Cindy Chen writes. “Two days later, I went back to school.” When Chen’s parents, both Chinese nationals, tried to start a new life for their family in New York City, her grandparents raised her in China, where she lived until she was 5. It was her grandparents who “took me to the park, cooked my favorite meals and tucked me in at night.” She remembers mischievously hiding her grandfather’s cigarettes and how he’d chuckle and call her a “bed egg.” His death, a world away and during the pandemic, was devastating. “I walked through the front doors holding back tears,” the New Jersey high school junior writes. “It wasn’t that I felt uncomfortable crying in public. I just wanted to avoid combining a mask with a runny nose.” In this piece, she reflects on the pandemic’s mental health toll and how the effects have fallen harder on young people, like her, who suffered from loneliness and depression even before COVID-19.

Read Cindy’s story here.

DOMESTIC ABUSE DURING QUARANTINE: “For as long as I can remember, I was a bird trapped in a golden cage. On the outside, my world was a glittering array of debate trophies, academic titles, college scholarships and a picture-perfect family. But no one knew the fractured portrait that was my abusive household.” So begins one student’s story of coping with toxic parents as COVID-19 took away the safe haven of school. As of 2020, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 children reported being victims of domestic abuse, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and the pressures of quarantine are likely to worsen those grim statistics. The author, who wrote anonymously out of concerns for her safety, said that like many teens who have been victims of abuse, being forced to stay at home was a prescription for danger: “In essence, my home life was a ticking time bomb.”

Read the full account here.

Trying something new

HOW NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON SAVED MY YEAR: Shortly after the pandemic began, Chicago high school senior Jimmy Rodgers “fully expected everything to just continue going downhill as the world made less and less sense.” The idea of being locked in the same room made him unimaginably depressed. The only time he got to leave the house was to bury his grandmother. But everything changed one day at 3 a.m., when he watched a video of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on YouTube. “I came to a startling conclusion,” he writes. “I was the person needed to solve the mysteries of the universe.” Tyson’s optimism and passion were infectious, Rodgers said, pushing him to do better in physics and commit himself to a career teaching and helping others in the Black community. “To my surprise,” he writes, “education gave me something to be happy about, rather than numb, at a time when all my days felt the same.”

Read Jimmy’s story here.

FOR THIS FIFTH-GRADER, SCHOOL WAS FOWL: For Zora Borcila-Miller, a fifth-grader in East Lansing, Michigan, the pandemic has sometimes been lonely. Once, she got so bored she made a twin out of her clothes, a pillow and some broomsticks. She’s been learning remotely since the pandemic began, but when she and her dad moved to a new house in downtown Lansing, six blocks from the Capitol, she met her neighbor’s ducks and chickens. Zora describes the “hands-on and interactive” education she got while school was virtual. “When I’m at school, I’m usually on the couch with my computer,” she writes. “I have never talked to my teacher in person, only on Zoom. And it’s OK. But, in school, we never got to meet a duckling born the day before.”

Read Zora’s story here.

Equity and privilege

COVID-19 RAISES STAKES FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS: Bridgette Adu-Wadier always knew she would enroll in college — the more prestigious, the better. But as the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, she didn’t always know how. For her family, education was the Way Out, she writes. “It was also a way to set a precedent for my younger siblings, lift my family up from poverty and potentially change their economic trajectory for generations.” The pandemic placed fresh obstacles in the way of that pursuit. Because of her parents’ work schedules, she had to homeschool her younger siblings. That, in addition to her rigorous academic routine, caused her to lose sleep. “I discovered a glaring similarity between college admissions and the pandemic,” she writes. “Both are difficult for everyone, but harder for some students than others.”

Read Bridgette’s story here.

MASK CONFUSION, AND A LESSON ON PRIVILEGE: In May, high school senior Ianne Salvosa crossed the graduation stage at Liberty High School, outside St. Louis, and accepted her diploma. But the lessons she’ll be taking with her to college will go far beyond academics. The past year of fighting over mask requirements has left her with some uncomfortable feelings about her classmates. Students, many of whom openly doubted the efficacy of vaccines, fought with teachers over wearing masks. Long before vaccinations were commonplace, administrators frequently walked the halls with masks down. “Like all seniors who have lived through the past year, I understand burnout,” she writes. “But it appears our academic fatigue has seeped into our response to the pandemic.” The cavalier attitude toward masks, she said, “feels like some sort of show we put on so that the rest of the world can believe we did our part. It’s an ugly feeling I’ll take with me into college and beyond the current crisis.”

Read Ianne’s story here.

Making connections, finding love

SEARCHING FOR WI-FI, STUDENT DISCOVERED HER NEIGHBORS: When New York City’s schools went remote in March 2020, Ilana Drake was stuck. Knowing the strongest Wi-Fi signal in her family’s small apartment emanated from the front closet, she set up base camp in a common hallway outside, across from the elevator. Then a strange thing happened: She began to listen. “You can hear everything in the hallway,” she writes. “I heard snippets of conversation from nearby apartments: marital arguments, frustrated parents, stock trades, kids engaging in homeschooling and, of course, a symphony of barking dogs.” She also got to know her neighbors and the building’s staff. Drake has a learning disability and recently graduated from the city’s High School for Math, Science and Engineering. But in the hallway, she learned that everyone had some sort of “academic backstory,” including the neighbor who dreaded standardized tests and the service technician who had been an engineer in the Dominican Republic and helped her with calculus. “Working in the hallway,” she wrote, “provided me with a passport to conversations that went beyond ‘hello’ and ‘have a good day.’”

Read Ilana’s story here.

YOUNG LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19: Ila Kumar remembers her pre-pandemic dating life with a whiff of nostalgia: the “charming absurdity of pretending you are older than you are, wearing itchy sweaters in bad restaurants, knowing the 15-year-old across from you is going to insist he pays for your slice of pizza.” Now, Kumar writes of the difficulties of navigating the tricky waters of teenage romance at a time of swiftly changing guidelines regarding masks and social distancing. “Maybe I forgot what it means to get to know someone — to uncover their secret talent for impressions, learn the way their hands move when they dance to music in the car and remember how they smell,” she writes. “Every corner of a relationship requires work, and the specter of something as small as unanswered messages, wanting eye contact and being left without it, and midnight arguments requires the singular power of trust.”

Read Ila’s story here.

Eating in class is typically allowed in my school. However, due to the pandemic, some teachers have limited snacking to the cafeteria so students can remain masked in the classroom.

The student refused to stop eating. The cycle of chewing, pleading and refusal repeated about five times.

In Missouri, I’ve had to swim upstream when it comes to masks in school. Denial of the virus’s validity isn’t uncommon, and doubts about the efficacy of masks often follows. The term “mask up” has become a cliché at this point, and students have become tired of the piece of cloth standing in the way of a typical school year. I can’t say I’m surprised by this defiance in a red state, but the ignorance and selfishness on display behind school doors goes beyond politics.

Through my peers’ TikToks and GroupMe texts, they have found platforms to air their disbelief of COVID-19’s harm. The frequently proclaimed of those infected has warped into a shield that makes young people feel invincible. However, that 1 percent should still strike fear into students. If everyone in my school of about 1,516 students got infected, a 99 percent survival rate would mean about 15 students would die.

I keep hearing the same misconstrued data point in the hallways. But as I witnessed the argument between the substitute teacher and my classmate, I realized that data was not a sufficient motivation to mask up — nor was empathy. The substitute explained that if the boy tested positive, she would be quarantined and unable to work for two weeks. His refusal persisted.

I’m reminded of this incident because in a matter of days, I’ll be walking across the graduation stage with my fellow seniors. As June 6 approaches, I’ve seen more and more students in the halls with no masks. Like all seniors who have lived through the past year, I understand burnout. But it appears our academic fatigue has seeped into our response to the pandemic. Our cavalier adherence to wearing masks feels like some sort of show we put on so that the rest of the world can believe we did our part. It’s an ugly feeling I’ll take with me into college and beyond the current crisis.

I get it. Mask guidance can be confusing. But by the Centers for Disease Control found infection rates were 37 percent lower in schools where teachers and staff were required to wear masks. The CDC has said that universal masking should continue at schools, at least through the end of the current school year. As for the fall, it may be too early to tell what schools can do before all students are vaccinated.

My school district only requires masks when social distancing is not feasible. But not only is enforcement of this rule nonexistent, we lack decent role models. When I walked to my next class after the sandwich incident, I saw my principal lowering his mask to speak to another administrator. This was in early March, long before most adults were fully vaccinated. One day, after I was exposed to a girl who was COVID-positive at my lunch table, I left through the main office and got signed out by a secretary who had no mask at all. Just a thin piece of glass separated her from various students and visitors who came and went (I was quarantined for 10 days until I tested negative for COVID-19).

My school district has released a of masks suitable for school and deemed safe by the CDC and the St. Charles County Department of Public Health. But the list is just a set of recommendations, still permitting the use of improper masks while school is in session.

the CDC recommendation “to prioritize universal and correct use of masks” by prohibiting mask mandates. Under pressure from legislators and parents, have already lifted mask requirements.

With teenagers starting to be vaccinated in large numbers, we see that an end is potentially near, a time when masks and other precautionary measures . I’m still waiting for this time. I don’t trust my peers to get vaccinated, having heard their doubts about its efficacy loudly expressed in the hallways and on social media.

As typical end-of-the-year celebrations like prom or graduation approached, my fellow seniors yearned for those events to be “normal.” However, each time that word got thrown around to describe the senior year we imagined, I was left wondering why we should be the exception to countless sacrifices people around the world have made during the pandemic. At the end of the day, my affluent public high school in the St. Louis area is still privileged enough to enjoy daily aspects of a regular school year, while other districts have not. We prioritized in-person instruction, which we have received for a majority of the year, but lower income school districts nearby have only had in-person instruction since March.

I won’t be attending college in Missouri, but I know that other places around the U.S. have experienced mask resistance. As I make this transition, I look back at my creative writing class and wonder if I should have stepped in. Would it have made a difference? Would the student have pulled his mask up if his classmates stood with the substitute teacher? Accountability has become very important to me. I feel responsible for my environment, for who could be with me during the next sandwich vs. mask debacle. I believe wearing a mask in school is a sign of respect, a way to show that I care about my peers’ safety and they care about mine.

When COVID-19 becomes a piece of history, I will not forget who was among those who failed to realize their “normal senior year” came at the expense of their classmates’ safety. I’m not one to burn bridges, but I know which of my peers to keep at arm’s length. As I prepare for college, I’m cautious about meeting my new classmates. I wonder if they were like the students at my school, masks down and privilege high. I want to surround myself with those who chose safety and respect.

Ianne Salvosa will be graduating from Liberty High School in Lake St. Louis, Missouri, on June 6. In the fall, she plans to attend George Washington University.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Taking care of birds is hard work, but I like it. I have been going to school online since the coronavirus pandemic started but some of the most interesting things I’ve learned are from working chickens and ducks in my neighbor’s backyard.

Six months ago, I did not know anything about ducks except that the ducks at Michigan State University would race for the pieces of bread I threw for them. Then my dad and I moved to our new house in Lansing.

Amanda, the owner of the ducks, lives across the street. I met her when my grandparents were over at our home and their Irish setter was very intrigued by the loud quacking. Amanda and Preston, our neighbors, were outside at a fire. We introduced ourselves, but I was more interested in my grandparents’ dog.

But one of the next times we saw her, Amanda invited me to come into the back and hang with ducks.

At first, whenever Amanda handed me a chicken or duck, I would drop them as soon as they started to wiggle. The first thing I ever learned was how to hold a chicken. You hold them under your arm like a football. The first chicken I held was named Pringles. She’s one of the escape artists.

Soon, I started coming over to see the ducks and chickens after school. I learned to collect eggs, change and turn bedding, spread out hay on the yard and chase ducks back up the block when they escaped. After I got more experienced, Amanda said I could come even when she wasn’t out.

When the weather turned cold, I learned to put oil and wax on the chickens’ and ducks’ feet to prevent frostbite and mites. It’s a tricky task. They wiggle a lot. I’m learning to identify bumblefoot, a kind of infection. I have learned that pekin ducks are the big white ones and that barred rock chickens are black and white.

I’ve learned that ducks like to snuggle.

I go to school in East Lansing, and I have been learning online for more than a year. This year we have been learning about slavery and fractions and decimals and water systems. When I’m at school, I’m usually on the couch with my computer. I have never talked to my teacher in person, only on Zoom.

And it’s OK.

But, in school, we never got to meet a duckling born the day before. A duckling named Haystack hatched about a week ago. This little one has already escaped and been pursued by Amanda’s cats. She’s fluffy and yellow and makes tiny peep sounds.

Sometimes the pandemic has been lonely. One time, I got so bored I made a twin out my own clothes, a pillow and some broomsticks. I’m mostly looking forward to the fall, when I’ll be back in school again in person, but I’ll miss all the time I’ve had with the ducks and chickens.

And I don’t plan to stop hanging out with them or helping Amanda.

Learning about ducks and chickens has been hands on and interactive. It’s fun. And it makes me want to keep learning and keep snuggling these cuties.

Zora Borcila-Miller is a fifth-grader at Pinecrest Elementary School in East Lansing, Michigan.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

There is a breed of champion racehorses, which in order to win, bite their own necks to get more oxygen. I think about these horses a lot.

Once, in an easier time, I pretended to browse a sushi menu with great intensity. I don’t even like fish. Across from me was my date, and next to me was my best friend sitting in front of her date, who was sitting next to his friend who was sitting across from his date. It turned out the third couple didn’t like fish either — they each ate a bowl of white rice. By the end of the night, their bill was two dollars.

A few months later, I scoured the menu at an Italian restaurant which had plastic grape vines hanging from the ceiling. Another one of these dates. I recognized with embarrassing clarity the flavored coolness of our young waitress’ breath — perky, minty breath only achieved through a tiny ghost rushing out of a menthol Juul pod.

I remember my life before this year with fondness because a) that is the nature of nostalgia, and b) there is something charming in the absurdity of pretending you are older than you are, wearing itchy sweaters in bad restaurants, knowing the fifteen year-old across from you is going to insist he pays for your slice of pizza; being smushed into the space between two couch cushions at a basement party; using a lighter, a needle, and a red delicious to add two more holes to your ears.

Now, I am a senior in my last semester of high school. It has been over a year since quarantine started. We have run out of nutmeg. How does that happen? There have been a lot of days like this. Although the evenings of making my hair smooth and eyelashes spidery are far from over — this year nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it.

The world was reaching out to us in the form of bad news. The warmth of the summer came with a background glow of violence and tragedy: the twin emergencies of COVID-19 and racial injustice. Growing up, metabolizing hatred like daily bread, drinking shock along with our morning coffee.

In June, this boy would send me pictures of his breakfast. Homemade huevos rancheros impressed me. Soon enough, I was taking breath mints before we talked on the phone. I remember begging my mom to let me see him. He begged too, in a more subtle way — offering to sanitize the car when he got to my house, and he’d drive with the windows down. Whatever I was doing — cultivating a taste for navy blue sweatshirts and at-home workouts, reading books on my roof to feel like I was out of the house — was a life of sustained waiting, anticipation pooling like day-old rainwater.

I remember the first time he drove me home. His hands never left 9 and 3 on the steering wheel. The third time he drove me home, his left hand stayed on the wheel, but the right was in my hand. The thirty-fifth time, he drove to my house alone. His left hand was driving and his right hand was gripping the glass shoulder of a vase, trying to prevent water from spilling. He brought me roses, and a note that said he was sorry.

It could be my distance from everyone else that amplifies my closeness to him. Maybe I forgot what it means to get to know someone — to uncover their secret talent for impressions, learn the way their hands move when they dance to music in the car, and remember how they smell. Every corner of a relationship requires work, and the specter of something as small as unanswered messages, wanting eye contact and being left without it, and midnight arguments requires the singular power of trust. When we fight, I never need to bite my own neck for oxygen in order to win. Instead, it’s like we’ve raced each other up a set of stairs, and we are pausing, out of breath, thinking about how foolish it was.

In the coming fall, we are both going to college, but we are committed to our hairy experiment in attachment. Sometimes, I think maybe this is the kind of optimism that is going to hurt to look back on. Like I have slipped on a banana peel into love, or I’ve fallen out of a moving car into oncoming traffic into roadkill kind of love. Except — when I look at him, I feel safe. After this year, that’s more than I could ever ask for.

Ila Kumar is a senior at Oakwood Friends School, a private school in Poughkeepsie, NY.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

At every school I’ve attended, there was always one teacher that older classmates warned us to keep away from. At first, I was surprised to hear about teachers who were known to “accidentally” brush up against female students, especially if they were wearing skirts. But as I grew up, I discovered how common these incidents can be. I started to do my part to quietly let younger classmates know who to be aware of and how to stay safe. Unfortunately, like many of my classmates, I also knew that speaking up any louder could risk punishment.

Some students are brave enough to turn to social media to speak out, especially as the #MeToo movement has made waves in the past decade. Social media allows for students to share their stories with the public, anonymously or not, and create real change by raising awareness of teacher abuse. However, many students still fear speaking out for fear of retaliation from their school administration, and that threat may become more firm with a case being heard this week by the Supreme Court.

The court is hearing oral arguments Wednesday in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., a case about a school district punishing a cheerleader who expressed frustration about not making the varsity team. She criticized her school and cheer team on Snapchat, using the F-word. The court will decide whether schools can restrict the First Amendment rights of students for their off-campus speech.

While this case is about one frustrated cheerleader, it has implications for student speech everywhere. If the Supreme Court permits districts to restrict off-campus student speech that criticizes schools, many incidents of abuse will never reach the light of day. Many students, myself included, already worry about the responses from our schools if we speak out about issues we see. With a ruling in support of the school district, any existing protections would be weakened further, taking away the current outlets students have to share and spread awareness of teacher abuse.

This issue is more important now than ever. In this past week alone, I have seen three news stories break about teachers abusing students in Texas: An ex-Tomball teacher was accused of sexually assaulting a student; a Parker County teacher was arrested on charges of having an intimate relationship with a student; and a San Angelo preschool teacher was arrested on charges of abusing a student. Same story. Different headline.

I shared these stories, along with other members of the Houston Independent School District Student Congress, submitted to the Supreme Court. We wanted to tell the justices about our own personal experiences as high school students, because for every story of school abuse that gets a headline, many more are never heard.

How many students have feared being punished for speaking out? This question keeps me up at night, and I worry that the number will only grow if the Supreme Court sides with the Mahanoy Area School District. The justices must rule in favor of B.L. and protect the rights of students to speak out.

Yesenia Gaspar is a junior at Carnegie Vanguard High School in Houston and a leadership member of the Houston Independent School District Student Congress, which represents the district’s 200,000-plus students.

Every adult in a school building gets a union. In New York City, most are members of the United Federation of Teachers, and together they are incredibly powerful and effective. They negotiate all the rules. They can influence hiring and firing procedures, and everything about teaching. They have negotiated an incredible for their members, including limits on class sizes, limits on their workload, limits on the lengths of school days and academic years, and many other policies that should have been decided, at least in part, by the students most affected by those policies.

Imagine if students could negotiate their class sizes, workloads and class-time limits. If we organized, we could take control of our educations and our schools, but that’s not all. Students have a fundamentally different kind of power and leverage than teachers or other school staff, so we shouldn’t limit ourselves just to collective bargaining like any typical labor union.

If the students of NYC organized, we could help each other in ways that the city Department of Education doesn’t. Instead of trying to compel the DOE to help us and hoping they yield to our demands, we could help each other directly and without DOE approval, which could be revoked at any time without any student input. Doing this would make this organization more of a syndicate than a union, which I think is a better term for what I envision.

If we, as students, formed a syndicate, what services could we provide to one another? Among others, this syndicate could organize sharing of resources among students of all schools and homeschools, making education more accessible to everyone. Some of these resource-sharing projects could be:

1 Lesson Libraries

Students could record lessons by their favorite teachers and share them with all students for free. Ideally, this could be done for all teachers at all schools, so all students could have the opportunity to learn from as wide a variety of teachers as possible. This would allow the best teachers to have the widest influence, an influence determined not by administrators of the DOE, but by the students who benefit from the education.

A lesson library could also help students at a particular school make better choices about which teacher’s classes they should take, and it could help them better prepare themselves for class, should they desire it.

2 Assignment Archives

The syndicate could organize and make available a comprehensive archive of the assignments students are given, the responses they gave and the grades they received. This well-organized archive would be an invaluable resource for many reasons.

First, having easy access to others’ work can help students understand what the standards and expectations really are, especially if a teacher expresses those expectations poorly. This archive would remove the mystery of how grades are given and how standards are applied.

Second, grade transparency is critical to ensuring that students are treated fairly. This archive could help reveal preferential or discriminatory treatment on the level of individual teachers, or even entire schools. Although employers and teachers have made it taboo to talk about money or grades, we must do so if we are to hold teachers and schools accountable for unfair treatment of students.

Any potential danger of plagiarism is irrelevant. It is likely that students would use the assignment archive to measure their own work against that of others, so they could improve their own work to meet standards they would be better able to understand. It would make teachers’ jobs easier because students would have effectively already had one or more rounds of feedback before submitting an assignment. This archive would also make it even easier to catch and avoid plagiarism by making any assignment easy to cross-reference across all similar assignments. Helping students to improve their work and helping teachers to catch plagiarism would be a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Both the recorded lesson library and the assignment archive would help students make more informed decisions about which classes to take and with which teachers. This would give teachers a higher proportion of students who had made the informed decision to be in their class, and it would give students’ a better idea of what they were getting into and help them prepare accordingly.

3 Textbook Libraries

Physical and digital textbook libraries/exchanges could be easily maintained by a student syndicate. Many schools use the same textbooks, and most widely used textbooks have ebook or pdf versions that could be made accessible to all students online, regardless of the school they attend. It could even give access to students whose classes might not require a certain textbook, but who would benefit from having access to one regardless.

The syndicate could also make digital copies of physical textbooks. Scanning every page of a textbook is an immense task for one person to take on alone, but if divided over 100 or so students, it becomes much easier. Once digitized, these textbooks could be distributed freely to all students so they could be accessible anywhere at any time. The same could be done for test prep books, before anybody writes in them. Nobody would have to worry about forgetting their textbook at school while doing homework or at home while doing schoolwork.

The syndicate could also organize interschool textbook exchanges and repositories to ensure that everybody has access to physical textbooks when they need them. If a particular school library lacks the necessary resources, the syndicate could help organize textbook sharing within a school and pool resources from other schools. This would even make purchasing textbooks more efficient, as a single textbook, purchased by the syndicate and shared, could benefit many more students than just one student buying one textbook.

4 Credentials Libraries

Certain schools keep lists of credentials for accessing online databases, libraries, news sites, test prep sites, textbook supplements, etc. Students could share both school and personal credentials to all these sites. The DOE already makes many research and library sites accessible to public school students, but the syndicate could expand access to homeschooled students and anybody else who wants to learn. Some schools have their own access to certain resources, and this could be shared more widely to benefit more students. A student syndicate could make and distribute an app allowing students from anywhere to redirect traffic through students’ devices in schools that have special access, so that every student could get any information they need, no matter where they are or what school they are physically in.

5 Technology Libraries

Especially now, with distance learning, students need devices and internet access. Device borrowing — or, ideally, giving — could be organized between schools when one school simply doesn’t have enough devices for all its students.

For internet access, students who don’t have access to Wi-Fi could be given the option to attend school at the home of a student nearby whose family has already been vaccinated or is at low risk for serious adverse symptoms or continued spread of COVID-19. This could also help students whose parents can’t supervise them at home by taking the responsibility of finding somewhere for students to learn off of parents and putting it onto students who are helped by syndicate organizers. Parents would only have to vet to their own satisfaction the family at whose home their child would be attending school.

All these suggestions could help students, and we, as students, could implement these programs if we organize.

Gregory Wickham was a student at Stuyvesant High School. He runs NYC School Tech, a site where people can donate spare laptops and tablets to students in need. He was a quarter-finalist in the 2014 Young Rewired State Festival of Code.

Millions of students because there isn’t a national solution to provide access to adequate internet or devices, especially in disadvantaged communities. Teachers are struggling to re-engage students while navigating the new terrain of . Black, Indigenous students and students of color are most impacted by these and other challenges making it harder to teach, and learn. Yet, during his campaign, the president-elect never articulated a strong vision for addressing these problems in his first 100 days.

Voters didn’t demand such a vision because education isn’t a priority issue in our elections. In last year’s presidential campaign, as a priority, while nearly half cited the economy and unemployment.

Students are trying to change that, and are asking voters to help them ensure that education isn’t forgotten in the next political cycle.

Last year, a group of two dozen student leaders from across the country set out to finally establish education as a top priority in America. They created a campaign called , with support from , that built a coalition of students, adults and social justice organizations. Utilizing the hashtag #RaiseYourHand, young people and allies shared their vision for public schools on social media and called upon the public to support a national student agenda — an ambitious vision for how to structure an education system that is responsive to students’ needs.

The agenda is intended to guide voter decisions about education now, and into the future. These activists, mostly students of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex students, are armed with their diverse experiences and the knowledge from having led local campaigns for educational justice, engaging over 1,000 students annually as organizers and participants in campaigns for systemic change. They are seizing upon a new opportunity for change, ushered in by an increase in our national focus on the inequities that disenfranchised communities struggle to overcome every day. Rather than reacting to the plans of politicians and administrators after budgets have been determined and resources allocated, students are setting a new standard for the future of education. It manifests through grassroots organizing campaigns that lead to student-first policy changes, such as redistributed police funding in districts and in schools.

Those campaigns elevate best practices for action, which are fueled by students building support for their demands for education. Through the Raise Your Hand demands, students envision a future for K-12 education that all political leaders, and the voters who elect them, should be seeking. Here’s what they recommend.

1. Strengthen decisionmaking and community support for change by including students on school boards, making board meetings accessible by permanently allowing virtual engagement, considering weekend scheduling and offering students ongoing opportunities to share feedback and provide public comments.

2. Transform broken K-12 school practices and outcomes through culturally relevant curricula for Black and Indigenous students and students of color; student-driven accountability standards such as evaluations of teachers and instructional effectiveness that include the results of student surveys; and reimaged classroom protocols to facilitate student growth through lenses such as .

3. Address the mental health epidemic by expanding in-school socio-emotional supports, resources and culturally competent practices that address the needs of diverse populations.

4. Create safe and nurturing learning environments by protecting disenfranchised students, implementing restorative justice practices, facilitating differentiated pathways for learning and ensuring access to rigorous coursework.

5. Promote equitable funding through innovative financial formulas, involvement of students in shaping funding decisions, allowing undocumented students to access in-state tuition and offering free higher education to disenfranchised youth.

These demands represent a transformative change in K-12 schools by addressing the and protecting the social-emotional well-being of all students, so they can focus on learning. Additionally, they serve as a blueprint for making education a priority and holding elected officials and administrators accountable. As voters, if we support the voices and demands of students, and keep them at the forefront, we can generate greater urgency and collective commitment to reimagine our schools.

As the father of a 2-year-old son, I embrace the opportunities that foster his growth; opportunities that derive from community. It’s a community founded on the belief that the education of the child down the street affects my child. My child’s education affects that of another. Education is a universal issue, period. The success of our schools should be a priority for every American because the pursuit of happiness begins with equitable education. If we can own that universal belief, we can hold politicians accountable and create a system that provides a high-quality education to all students.

We are living in an unprecedented moment, precipitated by the pandemic and polarizing politics. This moment has catalyzed a national reckoning on our nation’s racist past, which has implications for how we, as voters, shape the future with and for young people. With renewed focus on our values, Americans should demand that President-elect Joe Biden’s administration prioritize the above demands. Superintendents, principals and philanthropists must listen to students before advancing any changes to the school system.

Young people are the caretakers of tomorrow. Let’s become education voters and make our schools and young people top priorities listening to, and elevating, the voices of millions of students. That is how the ambitious vision the “Raise Your Hand” campaign lays out will become reality. We must get it right before the next election.

Mohan Sivaloganathan is CEO of , the nation’s leading movement of students fighting for educational equity

For the previous half hour, I had been thoroughly entertained as my class acted out scenes from “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The comedic attempts at Southern accents provided a welcome break from the day’s nervous anticipation.

But not even a good story lessened the anxiety of high-stakes college admissions.

Despite my youth, I’ve had many sleepless nights. I’m not talking about all-nighters preparing for tests or cramming through last-minute projects, though I’ve had plenty of those. I mean the stress of applying to college, during a pandemic, as a low-income, first-generation American. I would often lie awake at night wondering how I would pay for college, take on as little debt as possible and still make my parents and friends proud.

It seemed like an impossible task.

In my family, it was always a given that I would go to college — the more prestigious, the better. I’m privileged to have parents who highly value education and were able to get college degrees, even if they’re from institutions outside the United States. In first grade, I overheard them talking about college and my father’s struggle to continue his medical training after emigrating from Ghana. As early as elementary school, my parents began to encourage me to focus on college so I could accomplish what they could not — go to graduate school, find a job related to my degree and join an esteemed alumni network.

“You will go to Yale one day and excel,” my dad once told me. For my family, education was the Way Out. It was also a way to set a precedent for my younger siblings, lift my family up from poverty and potentially change their economic trajectory for generations.

I fell in love with Northwestern University in seventh grade. Its top-ranked journalism program, proximity to Chicago and artistic campus fueled a six-year infatuation, peaking with my application to join the Class of 2025 as a QuestBridge Scholar.

QuestBridge is an annual talent search program that offers high-achieving, low-income high school seniors full scholarships to top universities. This year, over 18,000 students applied for just under 1,500 scholarships. I applied in September, learned I was a finalist in late October and finished a mad dash to send financial aid documents and applications to Northwestern and six other prestigious schools by Nov. 1.

Once the Nov. 1 deadline hit, I expected life to slow down. After all, the chaotic sprint was over. If QuestBridge rejected me, I thought, I’d have plenty of time to prepare for regular decision applications in January. But the post-deadline period was agony. I’d been in consistently low spirits since the start of virtual school. Because of my parents’ schedules, the job of homeschooling my younger brothers, ages 6 and 7, largely fell to me. Between mentoring them and sticking to my rigorous academic schedule, I began to lose sleep.

Now I struggled to get out of bed. I worried about hypothetical rejections and acceptances. I missed class due to fatigue and sadness. This led to arguments with my parents. I grew increasingly irritable and resentful at our ongoing family strife. It was not the first time during my academic journey that I felt so alone. But never before had it seemed as if there were no release valve from the constant pressure. The boundary between work and home life blurred. The constant pressures from my parents about the importance of getting a full-ride scholarship became less motivating and more oppressive.

My college counselor reminded me that few people understood what it was like to apply for college as a student from a low-income immigrant family. Luxuries many of my peers take for granted — tutors, therapists, prep classes and emotional support from parents — are all things I went without.

The cost of living in Alexandria, Virginia, my hometown, is than the national average. is $96,733 compared to $61,937 across the United States. For years, I’ve seen my well-funded school district prioritize the voices of white, influential parents with money and lawyers over minority students with legitimate grievances about discrimination. Through , panels, and articles in my school and city newspaper, I spotlighted in the diverse school student body, such as school and the struggles of to integrate into my school. As a young journalist who was often just as affected by the issues I covered as the subjects I interviewed, it was empowering to chip away at the ivory tower my wealthy public school environment constructed.

It’s easy to scoff at the obsession with the Ivy League and other prestigious institutions. But for people like me, the name-brand degree means much more than a way to advance. It’s a chance to defy the odds and thrive in an environment where people like me were not always welcome.

“There is a seat at the table at every one of these schools,” my counselor told me during one of our many college admissions discussions. “And they will gladly welcome the voice of an African-American woman.”

But , a bill completely out of reach for my family of six and its limited income. When I considered this massive expense, I felt stuck, a feeling I knew all too well after two summer months without reliable Wi-Fi. I felt stuck after finishing the first academic quarter on Zoom, not knowing if there would be an end to virtual learning. I felt stuck as I continued helping my brothers get through first and second grade online, worried about their development as young students.

It was exhausting. With my dad’s taxes and an assist from Google, I filled out the financial aid forms myself. I was intimidated by the over 100 questions on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the over 300 questions on the College Scholarship Service Profile. Despite my desperate need for grants, these lengthy applications made me not want to apply at all. The size and complexity of the task felt daunting. I made several mistakes I had to fix because I had no idea which documents to send.

When QuestBridge decision day finally arrived, I stayed in AP Lit until the end. Then I immediately hopped on another Zoom call with my counselor to view the decision. In one click on our shared screen, the situation I’d been knee-deep in for months suddenly got unstuck.

So please forgive me for burying the lede: I got in! Through Questbridge, I won a full, four-year scholarship to Northwestern.

It was, to say the least, unexpected. I’d gotten used to seeing Northwestern as a pipe-dream, something that would never become reality. Until it did. The bubble of anxiety I’d formed around myself finally burst, and now I would be catapulted into an elite education.

In my quest for the Golden Ticket, I discovered a glaring similarity between college admissions and the pandemic. Both are difficult for everyone, but harder for some students than others. This is something my teachers and administrators got grossly incorrect, basing their academic expectations on the false idea that the pandemic is some sort of great equalizer. But not everyone is “going through the same thing.” Just one example: Some classmates, who kept their Zoom cameras off for fear of exposing their home lives, had been marked absent by their teachers. Despite their best efforts, many teachers simply don’t understand the unique situation of first-generation, low-income students.

I’ve heard many adults in my life say that kids are “putting too much pressure on themselves,” when honestly we just want a decent shot at changing our futures. As over-hyped as people think they are, . Our elders often describe college as something that opens doors, and I count myself extremely fortunate to be passing through one of them. For too many people in my position, however, the reality is a door slammed in their faces.

Years of public schooling instilled in me a staunch belief in meritocracy — that hard work would get me whatever I wanted. But living through the pandemic in the shadow of my affluent town taught me that hard work isn’t always enough. Some have more obstacles than others that keep them from achieving their goals.

I tearfully celebrated my Northwestern acceptance with friends from my school paper. That night was the first one in years in which I slept peacefully without stress.

It wasn’t until I began withdrawing all of my other college applications that the finality of it all set in. “It is done!” my counselor proclaimed contentedly at the end of our Zoom meeting. My college admissions process was over. I’d come out the other side in a triumph I once believed to be impossible.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Bridgette Adu-Wadier is a senior at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. She is an editor for her award-winning school newspaper, Theogony, and a freelance reporter for The Alexandria Gazette. 

This was the least nervous I’d ever been for a first day of school. No harried backpack repacking when the longest trip I’ll be making is from my bed to my desk. No frantic outfit selection when all my peers will see are the seven or so pixels composing my shirt on Zoom. I wasn’t totally unruffled: There was a good deal of unnecessary reorganizing going on in my room at 11 p.m. Still, I went to bed filled with a surprising sense of calm.

In some ways, I enjoyed my unanticipated tranquility. And part of my serenity was undoubtedly attributable to my new status as a high school senior — with 11 years of first days under my belt, it’s no surprise that some of the anxiety has worn off.

Still, I think my feelings, or lack thereof, about the return to virtual school speak to the broader sense of loss students are experiencing: perhaps less a sense of calm than one of dull disappointment. My school decided to start the semester entirely online, with plans to re-evaluate . This was a wise decision given Kentucky’s in coronavirus cases, and one that’s allowing me to avert the anxiety experienced by so many students facing elsewhere in the country. But those of us fortunate enough to not have to worry about contracting COVID-19 in crowded school buildings are facing an entirely different set of challenges.

The things that always make me nervous on the first day of school — meeting new teachers, reconnecting with old friends — are part and parcel of the things that bring me joy and excitement for the other 170 or so days of the school year. I was less excited to reconnect with my friends when I knew our conversations would be mediated by a computer screen, absent the privacy and intimacy of in-person communication. I was less worried about making a good first impression on my teachers when I couldn’t meet them face-to-face. I lost that sense of renewed structure and schedule effected by the return to a physical building, a feeling that can put butterflies in my summer-accustomed stomach but that also provides a sense of constancy for nine months of the year. I lost the unstructured moments, hanging out in teachers’ classrooms during lunch and chatting with friends in the library, that feel just as critical to the school day as actual instructional time. Going back to school simply didn’t feel like much of a meaningful shift after a similarly Zoom-filled and homebound summer.

There are advantages to the virtual format, to be sure. I’ll be avoiding the perennially disgusting bathrooms that are a prerequisite for any building occupied by so many adolescents. I can head outside and breathe in the fresh air between classes rather than weave my way through jam-packed hallways that somehow manage to contain around two thousand students. Best of all, I’m getting an extra 45 minutes of sleep without the need to pack my lunch and drive across town every morning.

But I think we all know that for most students, these limited benefits aren’t a replacement for the opportunities in-person schooling provides. While online instruction is certainly necessary to protect the health and safety of students and staff, it’s indubitably the less-popular option under regular conditions.

It’s simply more difficult to make a virtual classroom engaging than a brick-and-mortar one. People of all ages are realizing just how real Zoom fatigue can be. One recent study from Kentucky’s Prichard Committee Student Voice Team, of which I am a member, found that felt less engaged in their learning after the start of the pandemic. Online learning also provides fewer opportunities for the social interaction that’s deeply embedded in the typical school day, leaving many students feeling more isolated.

And none of that comes close to the additional difficulties faced by the students without stable internet connections or access to technology, the students who can’t attend synchronous classes because of familial or employment obligations, and the students who rely on their schools for healthy meals or mental health services.

Still, my school, at least, is giving me reason to be hopeful. Despite the unexpected and undoubtedly challenging circumstances, the teachers and administrators of in Lexington, Kentucky, are making a laudable effort to keep students engaged and upbeat, to provide not just a traditional learning experience but also the social education and connection schools regularly provide.

As I moved from class to class (or Zoom link to Zoom link) today, several moments made me smile. Many teachers adorned their Canvas pages with virtual Bitmoji classrooms, their avatars guiding students to important links and decorating class calendars. Others got distracted from their syllabi and embarked on rambling digressions, reminding me of the fascinating tangents I’ve loved in years past. In short, my teachers’ personalities managed to come through the small box they occupied on my laptop, reassuring me that even without the possibility of face-to-face interaction, I’ll still be able to make meaningful connections.

Even the structure of the school day had a reassuring familiarity to it. Small instances of continuity were helpful: My school is keeping its five-minute class breaks, the need to run across the building replaced with the desire for a pause from staring at screens. Despite some changes to the schedule, my administration retained the A/B block schedule I’ve become accustomed to, whereby students take an alternating set of four classes instead of having the same agenda each day. And lunch was an especially pleasant reminder of the possibilities of a virtual format, when my friends and I set up (this time on Instagram rather than Canvas) yet another Zoom call, chatting from seven different kitchens.

As the weeks progress, we’ll see what instruction looks like beyond the syllabus discussions and introductory activities that have always filled the first days of school. But now I’m less nervous in a different sense than I was before. In the lead-up to our first day, I experienced a startling lack of anxiety. Now, I’m feeling a bolstered assurance that virtual instruction will work out somehow, as we eagerly await a time when we can safely see each other in the hallways again.

During the pandemic, amid loud debates about COVID-related learning loss, the angst over whether to reopen or not to reopen, and the outrage over the latest Trumpian tweetstorm, it was sometimes easy to miss a quieter story: students grappling with the most disorienting semester of their lives.

To give voice to these experiences, The 74 created “Pandemic Notebook,” our ongoing look at students living and learning during the coronavirus, told in their own words.

The authors range from a third-grader lamenting the “worst summer break ever” to a graduating college senior offering a lighthearted look at how internet memes bring us together. Many of the writers graduated from high school this year, part of a generation bookended by the twin tragedies of 9/11 and COVID-19.

For all of these students, the pandemic was akin to hitting the snooze bar on normal.

Their semester was about much more than adjusting to the frustrating dynamics of remote learning. There was fear — fear for parents working on the front lines in doctors’ offices and restaurants, fear of not being able to stay grounded without in-person contact with mentors and friends. And there was loss, too. Not just graduation ceremonies turned awkwardly virtual, but canceled proms and final seasons of lacrosse and baseball cut short. Some turned on to a new world of Netflix-dominated downtime (does anyone remember Joe Exotic?); others tuned out, rediscovering the joys of reading or learning in the outdoors. Many others found themselves exiled from the virtual world, divided from their peers due to the cold economics of bandwidth.

Here are their stories:

Part staycation, part home detention

Just 11 days after her high school in Lexington, Kentucky, closed in March, Sadie Bograd laid out the dimensions of the new normal. “I’m conflicted,” she wrote. “Of course, I’m concerned for the health of my family and community. But as self-absorbed as it feels to say it, I’m also worried about not being able to go to prom.” She described life in quarantine as part staycation, part home detention — though like many at the time, she only expected it to last five weeks.

She dug into the ever-growing pile of novels and memoirs on her bedside table and binge-watched the latest seasons of The Good Place and On My Block. “But sometimes,” she acknowledged, “the prospect of an unstructured month incites an overwhelming sense of panic.”

Read Sadie’s story here.

Just 80 miles away in Louisville, Sky Carroll described how the speed with which COVID-19 went from threat to reality caught her and her friends off guard. “We might not finish our game of senior soakers,” wrote the recently graduated senior. “There might not be a prom or class trip. Maybe not even graduation.” She lamented the loss of her final season of lacrosse, a sport she said “helped me grow physically and mentally” and is, “because of the connections I’ve made, the only place I feel I can be my authentic self.”

“I know this all may sound trivial, and it is,” she wrote. “I joke with my friends about ‘the rona’ and laugh about the possibility of a virtual graduation ceremony. But the truth is, I’m scared.”

Read Sky’s story here.

Fear and isolation

For some students facing the pandemic, the stakes are existential. Rainer Harris, a junior at a New York City Catholic school, worried about losing his “resilient and very stubborn” mom. They’ve always been “very close,” he said. For instance, in the seventh grade, when kids at school called him the n-word, she told Rainer to be proud of it and that their words would only affect him as long he let them.

But in late May, she returned to her job as the practice manager of a pediatrician’s office in Manhattan. The job is high-risk: She engages face-to-face with dozens of sick patients a day, including drawing blood and collecting urine samples. But she is also 55 and Black, putting her at a much higher risk of exposure. “There is cause for me to worry about her safety,” he wrote.

Read Rainer’s story here.

Like many young people across the nation, Emily Bach saw her relationships, routines and responsibilities upended by the virus. For instance, there’s the history teacher she used to meet on Tuesday mornings to check in before class. Most days, they’d make jokes about their school’s poorly scheduled construction or failing sports teams, but on some, the graduated high school senior wrote, “his was the only smile I saw all day.” Attending school, going to club meetings and taking calls all made “the bad days feel more normal.”

For Emily and many of her friends, the pandemic underscored “the crushing impact of isolation on mental health.” A gay sexual assault survivor, Emily found that during the pandemic she became a sounding board for many of her suffering friends. “The comfort and familiarity of my day-to-day life were replaced by the fear and tragedy of watching my friends get sick, both mentally and physically,” she wrote.

Read Emily’s story here.

Both sides of the digital divide

Is it possible that just four months ago a world existed where many people had never heard of Zoom? In March, Hope Li walked readers through her awkward, glitchy and often hilarious first day of remote learning at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, California. “It felt like the first day of school all over again,” she wrote. “The night before, I couldn’t get to sleep.”

It was a day of breathing exercises, barking dogs and weird email messages from school with meant-to-be-inspirational quotes from the likes of Eckhart Tolle. “While some of the kinks have been worked out since that first day,” she wrote, “it’s only the beginning of a long experiment in this brave new world of remote learning.”

Read Hope’s story here.

Across the country and on the other side of the nation’s digital divide, Brandon Yam struggled for weeks to get an iPad from the nation’s largest school system. His 10-year-old Sony laptop, “glitchy from excessive use,” was the only computer available for a family of 9, wrote the junior at Francis Lewis High School in New York City.

For Yam, this is what distance learning looked like: pinching “the corners of my iPhone 6 screen wide, squinting to see my trigonometry and physics teachers doing practice problems on paper. Even so, my parents still bicker in the background of my Zoom meetings. I double- or triple-check whether my microphone is off to refrain from giving away too much of my home life to teachers and classmates.”

As someone who attends an elite public school and has two working parents, Yam recognizes his privilege amid the struggle. “Still,” he wrote. “it shouldn’t have taken two weeks to get a laptop, and it shouldn’t have been so hard to get simple answers from the district.”

Read Brandon’s story here.

The pros and cons of Netflix

Life in quarantine also introduced new concepts of fun. The pandemic didn’t invent Netflix binging, of course. But in a world where gathering in public was still dangerous, it became nearly ubiquitous. Asher Lehrer-Small, recently graduated from Brown University, seized upon the ways that “the virus puts many of us in the same boat. We’re stuck inside, bored, and unsure of what the future may hold.”

While he previously avoided social media, Asher wrote, digital connectivity now offered an “unexpected solace.” He laughed about the memes spawned from Netflix’s Tiger King and Cardi B’s Instagram transmissions. “Though absolutely no one is glad for the circumstances, our country has never had so much shared content to connect us,” he wrote.

Read Asher’s story here.

Faced with the same reality, Talia Natterson went in the opposite direction: She shunned television and daily Facetime calls with friends and rediscovered the joys of reading. “I longed for an escape from this new reality of the world around me and my isolation at home,” wrote the sophomore at a Los Angeles private school. “I dreamed of utopias and alternate universes in which coronavirus had never infected people.”

She laughed at Lady Susan’s flirtatious behavior and shuddered at the demise of Dorian Gray. Through these characters and their fictionalized worlds, she imagined a better future. “I am shocked by how unappealing technology has become for me during this ‘corona-cation,’” she wrote.

Read Talia’s story here.

Siblings, mentors

Some students had very little time for play. With parents working outside the home or lacking fluency in English, these students took on the roles of teachers and mentors to younger siblings. Bridgette Adu-Wadier, a junior from Alexandria, Virginia, is the daughter of émigrés from Ghana. As the first in her family with plans to go to college, she is on an ambitious trajectory, even during the pandemic. Last semester, she took five AP courses, with calculus Zoom meetings outside of regular school hours and essays due Sunday at midnight. But she is also responsible for teaching and caring for her young brothers. “We rarely have 20 minutes of uninterrupted peace,” she wrote.

The new reality left little dividing line between school and family obligations. “Online learning feels like more work than regular school because I am no longer doing assignments in isolation; homework and video calls drop in the middle of real life, which is much more exhausting,” Bridgette wrote. “At school, I’m divorced from my family obligations; at home during a Zoom call, people constantly enter and exit my room, and my brothers inevitably burst in and distract me.”

Read Bridgette’s story here.

Safiya Al-Samarrai comes from a family of refugees and recent immigrants from the ancient city of Samarra in Iraq. A first-year college student studying nursing at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Massachusetts, she also has many responsibilities at home. She helps translate appointments and pays the bills. “And I’m now buying most of the groceries because I’m scared to let my mom and dad leave the house,” she wrote.

In addition to her parents, she lives with her brothers and 9-year-old autistic nephew, who goes by his nickname Nemo. “The first weeks after our city’s schools closed, Nemo spent every day watching Pokémon,” she wrote. “It upset me that he wasn’t learning. My mom suggested that I try teaching him.”

Read Safiya’s story here.

Loss

The nation’s first COVID semester was also a time of missed milestones and lost opportunities. Steven Rissotto, a recently graduated high school senior in San Francisco, remembers the night the lights went out on his baseball career. On March 5, Steven was scheduled to relief pitch for his school team. Night games were rare, making them “adored and enjoyed by parents, coaches and players,” he wrote. The mood was festive, highlighted by food and drink. But then the news leaked that the parent of a student at school was diagnosed with the coronavirus, and Steven and his teammates were benched.

It was a tough pill to swallow for Steven, who “fell in love with baseball in third grade and never looked back.” “I love baseball because anything can happen,” he wrote. “The best team could destroy the worst team one day, and it could be the other way around the next. It reminds me about the reality of our current moment.”

Read Steven’s story here.

As with many students, Sunaya DasGupta Mueller’s academic life from March to June was a litany of sitting in front of her computer for seven hours a day, going in and out of Zoom video classes. For the New Jersey sophomore, the world of largely virtual learning sparked daydreams of a lost childhood. From kindergarten through third grade, she wrote, she attended a nature-based school “where I learned math by knitting, read English books in trees and fed goats in science class. We were discouraged from sitting in classrooms, or having any screen time, even at home. Instead, we painted with abandon, wrote and performed our own plays, and built fairy houses out of acorns in the field.”

During the pandemic, the practice of social distancing helped her realize that active engagement in a learning community is one of the most important aspects of an education. Looking back on her younger years, she wrote that “physical activity, whether doing lab experiments in science, shooting videos for art or solving math problems on a whiteboard, helps make learning real.”

Read Sunaya’s story here.

Most summers, Owain Williams, a third-grader in Washington, D.C., would spend time with his family playing in the city’s splash parks and playgrounds, celebrating birthdays and going on trips. “Now, because of the pandemic, all of that is gone,” he wrote.

A month away from summer break, he predicted weeks without fun. “I think that by then, it won’t feel like summer break,” Owain wrote. “It’ll feel like quarantine, because we’ve been home since March.”

Read Owain’s story here.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Her job entails engaging face-to-face with dozens of sick patients a day, including drawing blood and collecting urine samples. This puts her at a just based on the nature of her work. When you couple this with her race and age, there is cause for me to worry about her safety. I’ve been dealing with the added anxiety largely by reading (I’ve returned to the Percy Jackson series for pure escapism), journaling, and leaning on my friends more than ever through FaceTime, Zoom and text.

I’m very close with my mother and always feel comfortable telling her how I feel. When I was in the seventh grade and kids at my school called me the n-word, she told me to be proud of it and that their words would only affect me as long as I let them.

But she never shows her personal worries to me, and she always goes the extra mile to make me and the rest of the family feel comfortable. When she comes home every night, no matter how tired she is, she makes us authentic Jamaican food: plantains, ackee, rice and peas. It helps connect us to our roots.

We live in South Ozone Park in Queens, a suburban, middle-class and largely African-American neighborhood. My father, who does administrative work at a Midtown financial company from home, is doing the yard enhancement he has never had the time for in the past. My brother, a healthcare lawyer at a Manhattan firm, also lives at home, where he dedicates his time to legal work such as writing and handling contracts. (My sister, a rising senior at Yale, remains at her apartment in New Haven.)

My mother? She’s always been resilient and very stubborn, something that fills me with admiration and also frustration. I told her that I’m worried that she will contract coronavirus and have to be quarantined away from home for a while. She assured me that isn’t going to happen, and if it did, we could still be connected, even if it means making daily video calls. She understands my worries and usually responds by telling me about her duty as a front-line worker and how proud she is and how she will be sure to stay safe.

Despite the comfort I may feel in those moments, the statistics offer cause for concern. show that despite making up 22 percent of the population, Black people account for 28 percent of COVID-19 fatalities in the state. were largely expected, but the numbers are still disconcerting. New results from the nationally dying at more than twice the rate of white people. More than 20,000 Black people — about 1 in every 2,000 — have died from the disease. While Blacks had a fatality rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, whites had a fatality rate of 20.7 per 100,000.

My friends have been reaching out to me because they know my family and I are at increased risk. They ask me simple things out of the blue, like “How are you?” and “Is your family OK?” It’s simple gestures like this that remind me how lucky I am to have the people around me that I do. The stark statistical disparities, however, come as no surprise to me. They are the result of years of systemic inequalities in our , prominently brought to the public’s attention by the published the year I was born. Since then, these disparities have been acknowledged but largely unaddressed.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the most visible leaders in the fight against COVID-19, that “health disparities have always existed for the African-American community” and that this crisis is just “shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is.” While his recognition of this fact is great, the stark racial breakdown in the coronavirus death toll demonstrates that not enough has been done to fix these disparities.

from the New York Department of Health show that 9.6 percent of the coronavirus fatalities in the state were people in the 50-59 age range, which my mother falls in, accounting for more than 2,000 deaths. While the gravity of this crisis is a reality for families like mine, many young people glamorize breaking social distancing guidelines because they feel it is so critical to see their friends. I see Snapchat stories and Instagram posts with captions like “Fuck quarantine” that make it seem as if just because some people are bored of coronavirus, it’s over now.

In the same vein, have taken to the streets to protest the lockdowns. These protests make me very angry. For some people, it seems, economic prosperity is more important than public health. They’re disregarding the fact that there is an entire group of people in this country disproportionately harmed by their actions.

More than 70 percent of New York state . Although the city is just beginning to open back up to certain types of businesses, movement in and around it will likely spread the virus. I am happy for the state that the reopening process has begun, but it still doesn’t mitigate the anxiety I feel for my mother.

Before school finished Friday, I’d wake up at 7:30 a.m. to log on to Zoom for my classes and would barely have time to say goodbye to my mother before my father drove her to work. I tried to focus on school, even with distractions like television and video game systems two feet away. With summer and the promise of continued lockdown, the job of staying grounded is made harder when each day, I don’t know if I’ll get a call from my mother saying she has to self-quarantine and might not come home for weeks.

Rainier Harris is a junior at Regis High School, a Catholic school in New York City.��

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

It truly warmed my heart to see such a diverse group of people at the protest. But the reception the protests received afterward in many corners of the country broke my heart just as fast. It hurt me because for the first time in my life, I realized that America is so racist that when you protest racism, it’s considered to be protesting America. It hurt me because I realized that for too many in this country, kneeling on a man’s neck for over eight consecutive minutes is the American way. I cried, which was new for me, because as a black man I’ve never been allowed to have a moment of weakness. But it’s all truly overwhelming. I understand that not all cops are bad people, but as the old saying goes, “One bad apple can spoil the bunch.” Even as a little boy I was taught this, to be responsible for those around me, so it baffles me that grown men cannot fathom why we as a nation are angry with them all, whether they be good or bad.

The fact that Derek Chauvin, the officer who snuffed the life out of George Floyd, has so much faith in a system to do what he did not only in front of three of his colleagues, but also in front of all of America on social media, shows that the system itself doesn’t care about black people. Since the incident, Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder, and the three other officers have been charged with aiding and abetting him.

But to me, it’s clear that the problem doesn’t begin with the officers. The entire system is flawed. It’s as if the tree the spoiled apples come from was used to lynch black men. Not until that tree is cut down, the system destroyed, redesigned, then rebuilt, will a change be made to the edifice this country is built upon. I cannot sleep at night knowing that my great-grandma, who recently passed away, was subjected to tear gas during civil rights protests, and here I am, seeing black girls and boys who look exactly like she did getting the exact same treatment. Not nearly enough changed in her 96 years of living. America is somehow still the land of the free and home of the slave.

Jimmy Rodgers, 17, is a junior at George Westinghouse College Preparatory High School in Chicago. He’s a journalist, photographer and aspiring physicist and teacher. 

Caillou Allen will miss walking the stage for his diploma at his high school graduation next month.

He’ll miss taking the stage more.

For the past three years, the senior at Cleveland’s Early College High School has been part of , a troupe of African-American teens who perform dramatic interpretations of poetry and inspirational essays, and who have become a core cultural component of the Cleveland community. The Gentlemen have a tradition of performing at the graduations of each member, with the graduate giving a short speech or solo performance between group acts of poems by writers like Langston Hughes or Paul Laurence Dunbar.

“I am not going to be able to do none of that,” said Allen, 17, who’s headed to Morehouse College in the fall.

That can’t happen this year because COVID-19 shut down more than 20 Distinguished Gentlemen performances this spring and has forced the Cleveland school district to skip traditional graduations for a “drive-through” ceremony.

Just graduating at all is an accomplishment for Allen, whose disciplinary record during his elementary school years had him bouncing from school to school. He was even expelled in the fourth grade, he said, for making a bomb threat, which forced him to repeat the year.

Being bored in class, he said, made him act out, which made teachers write him off as a lost cause. The cycle of bad behavior repeated, he said, and had his family seeking new schools for him over and over. But by sixth grade, he was placed in accelerated classes that appealed to him and his high test scores let him jump ahead to eighth grade.

He was now a year ahead of schedule after repeating one year and leaping forward by two.

Allen then landed at Cleveland Early College High School, which pushed him academically — just not too hard, he said — and let him start accumulating college credit. Finishing classes during the pandemic was easy, he said, since seniors at his high school take courses at Cleveland State University, which moved its classes online after it had to cancel in-person gatherings.

He now wants to be a criminal defense lawyer to help the black community escape persecution.

He remembers clearly when he first saw the Distinguished Gentlemen perform at his school three years ago.

“At the time, I ain’t heard nothing like it,” he remembers. “They was all in sync and performing. It was like the Temptations. You know how they used to perform? It was together. They were all sharp. Dressed up.”

He was hooked and decided to join. Quickly welcomed, he loved the group’s performances and its focus on brotherhood and leadership. Founded in 2003 by Honey Bell-Bey, , the Distinguished Gentlemen have also performed at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and at

Bell-Bey — or “Miss Honey,” as members call her — also gave them essays and articles to read about social justice and the black experience.

“The Distinguished Gentlemen is a real tightly knit brotherhood. Everybody is for each other. I just loved it,” Allen said. “And we embraced our blackness.”

The pandemic has limited the group, shutting down performances for several weeks including through National Poetry Month in April, which Bell-Bey said is “our month, our holiday.”

Group practices have been moved to Zoom twice a week.

“You aren’t never going to get the same effect with technology that you do in person,” Allen said.

With graduation plans altered, Bell-Bey staged her own graduation ceremony for Allen on May 16 and , along with video of a drive-by salute from a motorcycle club and congratulations from executives from the Cleveland Clinic and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

After Bell-Bey opened with Marianne Williamson’s one of the Distinguished Gentlemen’s standby performances, she let Allen, wearing a blue cap and gown, and his mother speak, before closing with a performance of Dunbar’s with Bell-Bey and another member.

While not the same as performing at a traditional graduation, Allen said, the gesture mattered to him. In his speech, he said he hopes his Class of 2020 won’t be an afterthought because of the pandemic.

“It is important that we celebrate our graduates as much as possible, for they’ve done a great thing, only to have its acknowledgment cut away,” he said in the speech. “Let us say that we filled the gap. We gave them something better; a People’s Graduation, where a man is recognized for his merit by his entire village.”

“Can you get me a book to read?”

“When do I get to take the bus to school again?”

“What’s a coronavirus?”

When I first learned I wouldn’t be returning to school to complete the year, I immediately felt defeated and overwhelmed. The coronavirus has not brought any hospitalizations or untimely deaths to my family. But there has been increased stress, dashed plans and little quiet.

Along with my 12-year-old sister and parents, I have to homeschool my younger brothers for the next two months and figure out a way to keep them engaged through August, since local summer programs will likely be canceled.

We rarely have 20 minutes of uninterrupted peace.

On the last day of “regular” school, my brothers came home with three packets of work and reading logs. They’ve been working their way through them while watching interactive videos sent by their teachers. At 5 and 7 years old, they’ve learned to navigate Zoom with few problems.

But they are still struggling to grasp that school is something they have to do every day, even without their teachers’ direction. At home, they play loudly, watch Nickelodeon, make messes of their meals and get into several screaming fits a day. Their hyperactivity is endless, and so is their ability to squabble over stolen toy cars and spilled juice. Countless times throughout the day, my brothers burst into the room I share with my sister, hurling accusations.

“He scratched me!”

“He hit me first! He started it!”

“I’m not your friend anymore. I’m telling on you!”

Then one or both of them dissolves into tears. Before the pandemic, I had never seen so much animosity between my brothers. But I know it’s more than them being little boys. They aren’t used to being at home all the time and interacting with each other so much; it’s making them a bit restless.

The situation offers my sister and me an opportunity to teach them conflict resolution. We lose our patience often and yell at them sometimes, but we try our best.

“Don’t pick fights, both of you,” I tell them. “When someone makes you upset, don’t hit or scratch them back. You don’t want to be angry and sad during this time. Let’s do something fun that won’t make you upset.” I try to get them to focus their energy on positive activities like reading, drawing and playing quietly.

Because of my parents’ schedules, the job of teaching my brothers typically falls to me. My dad works remotely from home. My mom spends most of the day cooking, doing laundry and housekeeping. In the mornings, she gathers food for the family from distribution locations in the city where I live, near Washington, D.C.

A few weeks before I was born, my parents immigrated to the U.S. from Ghana in search of a better life. I will be the first in my family to attend college in America. Despite my determination, I at times feel frustrated. Prior to the pandemic, I was usually able to surmount the obstacles that often accompany having immigrant parents who don’t know the U.S. education system. They understand that it’s important to get good grades. But they don’t know what a GPA is or how to navigate college admissions and scholarships. They also don’t grasp that admission to American universities isn’t based solely on academics.

I’m used to being able to find a way, despite my parents’ lack of understanding. I’m used to being in control of my academic pursuits. I plan in advance. I try to register for tests and office hours; I meet with my counselor to soak up all the free advice. But with the pandemic, stay-at-home orders and SAT cancellations, very little is currently under my control.

I look to next year’s college applications with dread. Months ago, I saw myself done with standardized testing, traveling across the country for the first time and speaking at journalism conferences on the importance of youth media. Now homebound, I stress over SAT cancellations and online AP exams.

I’ve watched friends grow disappointed when internship opportunities fell apart. NPR recently that it had canceled its summer internships — somber news for my hopeful friend on a gap year who was awaiting a response.

This past month has been especially chaotic. According to the , teachers aren’t supposed to assign any new content or offer grades for the third quarter. During the closure, we’re only supposed to get optional review assignments on material we’ve already been learning. But since I’m taking five AP courses, I’ve been getting both new assignments and review material that piles up within hours. AP teachers have a lot more leeway to give assignments to students preparing for exams.

I’ve had calculus Zoom meetings outside of regular school hours and essays due on Sunday by 11:59 p.m. Trying to understand AP Physics problems online just isn’t the same, and I worry about failing the now 45-minute exam. Physics is very hands-on and application-based; the virtual labs are no substitute for in-person experiments. Online physics is much more dull and difficult, something I wouldn’t have dreamed possible before the pandemic.

At home, I never truly feel like school is over. I could be eating a meal or reading a book when I am jolted by notifications from teachers about missing assignments. In the middle of cleaning up after my brothers, I remember Zoom meetings I didn’t put on my calendar.

Online learning feels like more work than regular school because I am no longer doing assignments in isolation; homework and video calls drop in the middle of real life, which is much more exhausting. At school, I’m divorced from my family obligations; at home during a Zoom call, people constantly enter and exit my room, and my brothers inevitably burst in and distract me.

I work on my schoolwork late into the evening, usually past midnight. Like many other students, my sleep schedule has been derailed.

I’ve heard from friends who are only children about how lonely and isolated they feel. That makes me feel lucky, even in my loud and turbulent home. At times, I relax by making illustrations and practicing hand lettering. I also journal when I can.

I haven’t achieved any structure or order to my days; they are as disorganized and erratic as my thoughts. But I do try to approach this with the same mindset I’ve had since the first day of school — that is, taking things day by day.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Bridgette Adu-Wadier is a junior at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. She is an editor for her award-winning school newspaper, , and a freelance reporter for . 

I set my alarm for 5:50 a.m., Monday, March 20 — 10 minutes before the city’s tech department opened. I quickly typed in their number, put my phone on speaker and waited. And waited. I was on hold for an hour until I couldn’t take it anymore and hung up.

My first day of remote learning at Francis Lewis High School in New York City had begun.

Still, the largest public school system in the country couldn’t take my call, fix my problems or hear me out. It was like speaking into a void.

On March 15, Mayor Bill de Blasio responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by shutting down New York City’s public schools until April 20 — and has since proposed for the rest of the school year. The day of the mayor’s announcement, the screen on my 10-year-old Sony laptop flickered on and off, glitchy from excessive use. A notification of a popped up, informing us that we needed to fill out a form to get one of the available for students across the city who lack access to broadband. So I sat my parents down and translated the message into their native Cantonese.

Filling out the form took 15 minutes — not because of the form’s length, but because of the speed of our laptop, connected to nothing but a broken charger and weak Wi-Fi.

I wanted to make sure our form didn’t get lost in the district’s vast bureaucracy. With each call to the education department, a stern voice emerged putting me on hold for an hour, only to inform me after my 14th attempt that week that they had no answers — that they could only help us fill out the form.

“Sorry, sir,” the provider said. “I can’t help you with that. If I could, I would. But I can’t.”

“No, it’s all right,” I said, my voice breaking.

“Why’s this so hard?” my mom asked, crying.

I gave her a tissue, squeezing her shoulder. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

She gestured to the faint screen. It cast some light into the dark corner of our living room, where the blinds were drawn — my mom likes it like that in the morning. “All we want is one iPad,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to do this.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo mandated that nonessential workers stay home, but my dad is a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Flushing, where the number of coronavirus cases is , and my mom works at the same post office where .

They feed seven mouths: my grandmother, my five siblings and myself. That arrangement is somewhat unusual. My siblings and I are two sets of triplets: three sisters, six years older than me, and my two brothers and myself, all age 17 and preparing to apply to college next year. Because of the financial toll my sisters, who graduated from college last year, took on my parents, my brothers and I worry about getting enough federal financial aid. My parents paid for my sisters’ room, board and tuition, and they have shelved their retirement plans now that my brothers and I are on the same trajectory. My eldest sister has taken out more than $40,000 in loans for her master’s, and my two other sisters have been laid off from work (as education and career counselors) due to the virus.

I know my parents. They’re resilient. They emigrated from Hong Kong over 40 years ago, when they were my age, and made something of themselves. They’ve raised six children and are putting all of them through college. But their hard work won’t protect them from the virus. They’re on the front lines of getting it.

I’m scared they’re not going to make it. I’m afraid they’re going to die working, that we’ll be evicted and end up living out on the streets. They hide their fear of spreading anything from work to us with hugs, kisses and smiles — dangerous though such actions may be in this strange time. They didn’t explicitly say I shouldn’t worry, that I should focus on attending Zoom meetings on my phone, studying for the SATs and applying for summer programs after my junior year.

But I worried that we wouldn’t get a device. And for weeks, we didn’t.

Distribution has been a for hundreds of thousands of students like me across the city who couldn’t get a device in the first two weeks of remote learning, Chancellor Richard Carranza said, primarily because priority was given to students with circumstances more dire than mine — homeless students, for example. To me, this cold economic calculation had the effect of shrinking me down, smaller than I already was, in the dark corner of my living room, my life.

For two weeks, my siblings and I butted heads to get to the router at the center of our living room for a bar of internet connection. Whichever of my brothers, usually the eldest, arrived there first, got the laptop. The rest of us — my sisters, my younger brother and me — wound up using our phones for homework and leisure. I often pinched the corners of my iPhone 6 screen wide, squinting to see my trigonometry and physics teachers doing practice problems on paper.

Even so, my parents still bicker in the background of my Zoom meetings. I double- or triple-check whether my microphone is off to refrain from giving away too much of my home life to teachers and classmates. My next-door neighbor’s dogs yap at sunrise when we’re trying to sleep. I blankly stare at them through my window until they stop.

But somehow, we’re making do. While internet access issues have distanced me from my education, I feel surprisingly OK about it. I’d rather have butting heads, bickering parents and yapping dogs than no education at all. And I did end up getting a device on Sunday, April 5 — two weeks after distance learning started in New York City and just as the give-and-take of Zoom and Google Classroom started to feel normal.

My story, unfortunately, is a common one for New York City public school students of color from low-income backgrounds. As many as in my Flushing neighborhood lack access to broadband. This is a cycle that keeps poor communities poor. I know because I’m living it.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m luckier than a lot of my peers whose zip code determines their level of learning. I attend one of the most selective and applied-to public high schools in New York City. Since elementary school, I’ve recognized that my education was a privilege. After all, I live in a house with two working parents, multiple phones and one laptop. My three sisters have all gone to college. So will my brothers and I.

Not every student has it so easy. Still, it shouldn’t have taken two weeks to get a laptop, and it shouldn’t have been so hard to get simple answers from the district. Now, I sit here wondering how many other children have had to act on their own with parents at work — playing the roles of traffic cop, translator and support system, trying to find light in the dark corners of our education system.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Oh, and back in March, when all students were sent home from school, I realized I did not know how to teach my third-grade nephew.

I’m juggling a lot. My college classes are all on Zoom. Teachers have seemed to expect us to complete more and more assignments each week. Perhaps they are under more pressure to make sure that we are learning, and that concern translates into additional assignments. Besides that, I have many responsibilities at home. I help translate appointments and pay bills, and I’m now buying most of the groceries because I’m scared to let my mom and dad leave the house.

I live with my parents, my brothers and my 9-year-old nephew, who goes by his nickname Nemo. Nemo loves animals, building Legos and watching Pokémon. Last year, he was diagnosed with autism. At school, he is in a special ed class and has a one-on-one teaching aid. But since the “stay at home” advisory, it’s just me and him.

The first weeks after our city’s schools closed, Nemo spent every day watching Pokémon. It upset me that he wasn’t learning. My mom suggested that I try teaching him. We are refugees and recent immigrants. I have the strongest English in the family, but I had no idea how to be a teacher. When I was 9, I was still living in the ancient city of Samarra in Iraq. Third grade for me was the first year I started learning English.

For help, I reached out to my former high school social studies teacher. She sent me links to math videos, education websites and reading programs. I came up with a class schedule.

My nephew was confused when I told him I would be his teacher. “Can I have the weekend free?” he asked, a little worried. “Yes!” I promised. “But are you going to be my teacher, not my sister?” (Since he was little, he has called me sister, not aunt.) I laughed. “No, I’m always your sister.” He was happy to hear that.

The night before our first day of lessons, I was stressed. Before I went to bed, I worried, “What if he doesn’t understand me? What if he asks me a question that I don’t have an answer for?” But I hoped everything would go smoothly.

Day one as Nemo’s teacher: 

9:00 a.m. Nemo is awake before me, already watching Pokémon. “Time to start school!” I said. He jumps up and says, “I have to take a shower first!” He never likes taking showers in the morning! But before I can stop him, he’s run away to the bathroom. Sigh. It’s only day one.

10:05 a.m.: We finally start our yoga session in my bedroom. Even before I open my computer, he sits, crosses his legs, closes his eyes and chants, “Ommmm.” He learned this from a movie he loves. I can’t stop myself from laughing. Then he starts laughing. At least we are letting some energy out.

But then he realizes I am serious. We cross our legs on the floor. We twist and stretch our backs up like cats. He thinks it’s really fun and wants to do it again and again. My first success!

10:45 a.m.: On to reading. Nemo chooses the book. Of course, he selects one about coyotes that he has read a hundred times before. He reads out loud, but he’s basically memorized every page. I try asking questions: What do coyotes eat? Where do coyotes live? Nemo knows every single detail. Maybe I should choose the next book.

11:00 a.m. Nemo wants a break, and because it is the first day, I say OK. I use the time to answer school emails. I have a new English assignment in my inbox, but I can’t do it now. I have to focus on Nemo.

11:15 a.m. Since the shutdown, I have been really stressed, and my former teacher suggested I try a meditation app. Today, Nemo joins me. We sit and close our eyes. “Ommmm,” Nemo yells. Here we go again! The app tells us to focus on our breath, relax our muscles, let everything go. “Her voice is too soft!” Nemo shouts. “Shhhhhh,” I whisper back. I adjust his legs, put his hands on his knees and lightly use my fingers to close his eyes. We focus for three minutes … and then my mom walks in, holding the phone. “Safiya, I need you to translate for the doctor.” A few minutes later, we try again. “We are being serious now,” I tell Nemo. I have to be serious so he can focus, but inside I’m laughing. Meditation usually takes 10 minutes. Today it takes 25 minutes. And it is in no way relaxing.

11:45 a.m. Time for math. Nemo knows his 1 to 5 multiplication tables. We practice the first multiplication table, and I ask him to write them down. “This is boring!” he shouts. I start panicking. How do I make math interesting? “I’m going to time you,” I tell him. He is excited to beat the timer. Success. Now we need to learn the six times tables.

12:30 p.m. A second break: Oreos and apple juice. Nemo excitedly tells me how he wants to become a scientist and find dinosaur DNA. Maybe tomorrow we can study science together?

12:55 p.m. One final book, this one a little harder: Curious George Makes Pancakes. I ask him to read it out loud, but he quickly gets mad. “NO, this is hard!” he says, frustrated that he cannot read out loud and wanting to stop. I end up reading to him. There is a lot of new vocabulary: fundraiser, volunteers, speech. I try to explain each one, and he tries hard to focus. “Can you make pancakes for me?” he asks. I promise him that we will on Saturday. But today, I have two conference calls, three class assignments, one online training for my day care job, and I need to help my dad and brother plant fruits and vegetables in the backyard.

I declare today’s school completed.

We’ve come a long way since that first day teaching Nemo. We are up to the 8 times tables in math, and we’ve been studying space. He particularly likes black holes. He still laughs during yoga — I’m not quite sure why. And sometimes he still gets impatient with reading.

I have only one student, and it’s exhausting. I can’t imagine how my teachers manage their classes and support as many as 150 students a day. I appreciate them more than ever before. But I’m also excited and proud that Nemo has continued to learn over the past month even if he can’t be with his classmates. I never worried about his education before. Seeing him now as a learner makes me better understand how small things frustrate him, but also how fast he is at math and how excited he is by science.

Given our new reality, there is a lot I feel I don’t know. But one thing I do know now is that I can make this new reality positive, productive and loving for my nephew. And that means maybe it can be the same for me.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Safiya Al-Samarrai is a first-year college student studying nursing at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her nephew, Nemo, is a third-grader in elementary school.

This isn’t how most school years usually go.

But soon, in less than a month, school will be over and it will be “summer break.” I think that by then, it won’t feel like summer break. It’ll feel like quarantine, because we’ve been home since March.

That’s the problem: Summer break starts on June 5, and it’s going to be a lot like our last few months of distance learning. But it’s also going to be way worse than our usual summers. It’s going to be the same, but also different.

My days won’t change a whole lot when school ends. I’ll still be in quarantine at home, doing the same stuff I’ve done since March. It’ll just feel even more boring because the online video calls for school will end and they’ll stop sending us work to do.

I’ll also feel sad, because I won’t be able to stop thinking about seeing my friends again. Most days, I still won’t be able to see any of them, because they could have the virus, for all we know. Even when I can see them, we won’t get to actually play — I’ll have to be six feet away and won’t be able to throw and catch a ball with them. There aren’t many games that you can play while social distancing. We keep in touch on video calls separate from our school day and we’ve started sending letters, but it’s not the same as seeing them in person.

I suppose we’ll try to have fun even without our friends. And there’s always stuff to do inside with my family. We’ve been entertaining ourselves like this for a while. This summer, we’ll play with my little brother. He likes it when we read books, especially Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks and Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! He also likes it when we talk to him and build block towers and castles for him to destroy. When he’s busy, I’ll play games like Hanabi, Rat-A-Tat-Cat and Boggle.

We’ll also get outside sometimes too. We can go on hikes in Rock Creek Park, so long as we are careful to stay away from other people. I’ve been working on training for a half-marathon, so maybe I can get up early and go running sometimes with my dad.

But it’s still going to be hard. Most summers, we’d play in the city’s splash parks and playgrounds. We’d celebrate birthdays. We’d go on trips to see family. Now, because of the pandemic, all of that is gone. This summer might be a lot like the spring, but it’s not going to be anything like the summer I wanted.

Still, during the quarantine, I’ve been thinking about how many doctors and nurses are working across the world to save people’s lives. They’re acting bravely and trying their best to help people even when they’re in danger of getting the virus themselves. If they can tough it out, then I can handle a few more months stuck at home, busting my dad’s chops.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Owain Williams is nearly finished with third grade at a public school in Washington, D.C.

For a while, I agreed. I could watch television for hours on end, have daily FaceTime calls with friends and study, all without unnecessarily exposing myself to the coronavirus. This “break” seemed like a blessing in disguise. I could relax while doing well in school and still maintain a semi-social life by texting, calling or even sending selfies on social media. Modern technology was the silver lining to this quarantine. Or so it seemed.

Just one week into the lockdown, my vision of a blissful, calming pause in the school year turned melancholy when my grandmother’s partner of almost 14 years passed away from lung cancer. Because of the pandemic, new laws passed in Los Angeles regulating the number of people who could attend a funeral meant my family had to mourn alone. I had no experience grieving for someone I held so close to my heart. Suddenly, it felt like nothing could raise my spirits. I longed for an escape from this new reality of the world around me and my isolation at home. I dreamed of utopias and alternate universes in which coronavirus had never infected people and the man I thought of as my grandfather still talked to me. Suddenly, in the middle of one of my daydreams, I jolted out of bed and knew what I had to do: I would read books.

In the morning, I created a list of novels by famous authors whom I longed to read. Tales that had been published far before I was born filled my online shopping cart, and as soon as the books arrived, I dug in. While the pieces I selected did not take place in true utopias, they took my mind off current events. I laughed at Lady Susan’s flirtatious behavior and shuddered at the demise of Dorian Gray. Through these characters and their fictionalized worlds, I imagined a better future rather than dwelling in the present or longing for the past.

I am shocked by how unappealing technology has become for me during this “corona-cation.” Except for school, which occupies about six hours of my day, I sit with a book in hand, taking in the words of historical authors. My free time hardly includes a computer unless I am writing or studying, and my phone has never been used less. Yes, communication with some of the real characters in my life has taken a hit. I still talk with friends on a daily basis, but there’s almost nothing to chat about other than school and the virus. As odd as this sounds, my fictional friends have far more interesting news to share. I love my real-life friends, don’t get me wrong, but new and interesting conversation starters are very hard to come by at a moment when we aren’t going anywhere, meeting anyone or experiencing anything particularly new. Who would have thought paperbacks would be my savior in a moment controlled by the internet?

In these novels, people are living with passion, falling in love and finding themselves in tricky little situations. Traveling around the world is not prohibited but rather encouraged, and illness is not the most common cause of death. Holding hands is expected rather than tabooed, and gathering in large groups each night is downright ordinary. The lives these characters live bring me back to the months before quarantine, and suddenly, the sun starts to peek out of my gray, cloudy mindset.

As a child, years before I owned a cell phone, operated a computer or knew any websites other than YouTube, my days were filled with books. Harry Potter filled my mind with wonder, while The Mysterious Benedict Society planted excitement. I credit books with shaping my sense of humor and curious ideas, among other things. The stories were my mind’s food, and it was always hungry. Friendships like those in Ivy and Bean and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants encouraged me to go out of my way and meet new people, but also to never forget my oldest companions. Meanwhile, Wonder taught me the importance of not judging someone for their looks and to be kind to everyone. Eventually, my imagination ran stale, and my spark for wonder flickered just a bit less. Yet in just a handful of pandemic-inflicted weeks, that youthfulness has returned, right when I needed it most.

Even though I’ve experienced heartbreak and solitude, rediscovering my literary self has been a major positive. The objects that have anchored me through these crazy times, books, have been thrown to the side by most because technology often seems more appealing; but television is not a lifesaver. We probably all agree that Netflix is fun for short periods, but when you find yourself rewatching Gossip Girl or Glee once again, don’t be scared to hit the off button. If you are not simply cruising through this downtime but find yourself struggling, worried or lost, then rethink picking up a book — it won’t bite. Instead, reading will take your mind off the present, inspiring you to look with positivity toward the future.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Talia Natterson is a sophomore at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, a private school in Los Angeles, California. She writes for her school publication, Crossfire.

Like most people with a mental illness, I used to have a routine I relied upon to mitigate the effects of suffering on my life. I attended school, went to club meetings and took calls in an attempt to make bad days feel more normal. I used responsibilities as motivators to avoid disrupting my life, even when it wasn’t easy. In short: I relied on the day-to-day of “normal” life to pull me out of a bad headspace.

But as any student or teacher knows, a “high school experience” is closely defined by the people who participate in it. Particularly for vulnerable young people, teachers and adults can be a refuge from complicated home lives. I’m a gay sexual assault survivor, and despite my having incredible parents, my teachers were an important backbone to my support network.

For two years, my history teacher and I met on Tuesday mornings to check in before class. Most days we’d make jokes about our school’s poorly scheduled construction or failing sports teams, but on some, his was the only smile I saw all day. Since school closed, we haven’t spoken in nearly two months.

As with many young people across the nation, most of my relationships, routines and responsibilities were upended by the coronavirus. The comfort and familiarity of my day-to-day life were replaced by the fear and tragedy of watching my friends get sick, both mentally and physically.

Difficult access to medicine has exacerbated an already taxing time for mental health. To be clear, all medications are still technically available. However, as people flock to “virtual” psychiatrists, during the pandemic make it difficult to fill certain prescriptions. In particular, medications used to prevent panic attacks are heavily regulated, as they act similarly to opioids for people without PTSD. After my former psychiatrist discontinued care, I spent around 12 hours on the phone with different providers before finding a psychiatrist willing to fill a prescription I’ve used for months. In the process, I spent days without vital medication.

But even for people who didn’t previously need formal mental health care, the general culture of stress, anxiety and grief created by the virus has strong mental health implications. Nearly all of my close friends describe feeling hopeless, anxious or sad. I’ve listened to many of my friends hyperventilate into crying spells in recent weeks, something that never happened prior to the virus. Some even began contemplating self-harm.

Despite my best efforts to help, nothing I said improved their mental health in a meaningful way. It felt as though our conversations were like Band-Aids on gunshot wounds that require professional treatment. However, the therapeutic resources they need are in short supply, as people across the nation are struggling with similar issues.

In times of scarcity, friends — in this case, fellow students — often fill the roles of informal therapists, despite having neither the training nor the resources to do so. Among my friends who are newly struggling with mental health, almost all of them reached out to me or other students with mental illness for help, asking about issues ranging from decreasing anxiety attacks to preventing self-harm.

While well-meaning, these advice sessions often devolved into complex therapeutic questions. Online chats became sites for makeshift group therapy. In ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t feel guilty about lacking the skills to do this. Previously, being able to recommend formal resources allowed me to feel comfortable and confident in the health of my friends when I knew I couldn’t help. It soothed my worries for others and allowed me to focus more on my own health, which is a difficult juggling act even in ordinary times. But with fewer formal resources, some students won’t get the help that they need.

In response, a number of are providing free counseling, therapy and mental health resources to struggling teenagers. While they’ve temporarily helped many of my friends, they’re a solution with a time clock, particularly as some free services become overwhelmed. Nonetheless, as therapists and mental health care providers work to accommodate an increased need, crowdsourced therapy funds and free resources are helping to bridge the divide.

Beyond formal counseling, my close friends and I are starting to find new ways to cope in quarantine. Personally, I now make weekly to-do lists instead of daily ones, which gives me more flexibility on my sluggish days. I’m in the process of adopting running as a quarantine hobby, though it can probably be better described as walking with an overzealous and easily distracted puppy. Regardless, interrupting my screen time is becoming more important, especially as social media and Netflix become staples of my daily routine. Some of my friends have started making new playlists, getting dressed up despite staying home, and doing homework outside to help cope with the impacts of social isolation.

Everyone manages school closures differently, but choosing to view coronavirus lockdowns as physical distancing in social solidarity is important. Connection is vital in uncertain and scary times, particularly as the impact of the virus persists. Checking in on those around us won’t solve mental health problems or eliminate the stress of coronavirus, but in some cases, it can be the necessary first step to help students get the support that they need.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Emily Bach is a senior attending high school in Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools.

With all this chaos, though, we still live in an economy in which most occupations will require more than a high school diploma in the near future. Students must be prepared with an adequate education.

So let’s think creatively about what we can do to help. One constant resource for kids of all ages is the local library. Why not begin by opening libraries and using them as one way to bridge the gap? Reading is the gateway to learning, and nothing is more valuable to children than developing a love of reading. Yet according to a recent survey, only of American students read for enjoyment.

Could we use this moment to help cultivate that love?

Widely available antibody testing is inching closer to reality. It could soon be possible to partially staff libraries with employees who have recovered from the coronavirus, who are therefore more likely to be immune, and who volunteer to return to work.

After libraries are deep cleaned, librarians could curate recommended reading lists and encourage children to check out books from them. Teachers could also develop reading lists and periodically ask their students for book reports, to demonstrate that they’re participating.

This would not be a replacement for online learning; rather, it would be a supplemental solution that could reach all students equitably and without requiring too much parental assistance. For some families, it would provide a welcome break from their new teaching duties.

With at least already closing schools for the rest of this academic year, summer is starting early for many students. Even during a normal summer, many students, especially lower-income children, lose up to ; an anticipated “COVID slide” is likely to make things even worse.

To combat summer slide, schools have long promoted summer reading programs, which have been shown to . Accessing good books could provide an escape during the long months between now and the fall. And perhaps students who never read for pleasure before could get hooked on books.

To communicate about the program, schools and districts could send out emails and put flyers in the free meals distributed to students at .

To maintain social distancing, libraries could designate specific days of the week for different grades. Students would line up outside their library on their designated day, six feet apart, wearing masks and gloves. The libraries could make books from their reading lists available on tables just outside or inside the door. Children could then take turns choosing their next books.

A week later, they would return what they took in a paper bag and check out new books. Librarians would allow bags of returned books to sit for — the virus’s lifespan on plastic — before handling. For an extra precaution, libraries could even remove the typical of most library books.

Districts and charter schools that are distributing hotspots and devices to families with no internet connection could give them out at libraries as well, to reach any families who have not yet received them. Some before COVID-19; there is even more reason to do so today.

As the program would gain in popularity, students would tell their classmates and friends about it. Teachers could even offer rewards for the number of books read and the number of other students recruited to read.

I expect many teachers would be excited to participate, on a voluntary basis, and have the opportunity to see their students again. Communities could organize book drives and create boxes outside libraries to be filled with donated books. The libraries could let the donation bin sit for at least three days, then allow students to take a few books to keep.

This initiative could help meaningful learning continue for all students, regardless of circumstance. And it could fuel a love of reading in a new wave of students, of all income levels.

As Dr. Seuss said, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

Bruce Arao, a spring 2020 intern at the Progressive Policy Institute, is a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, double-majoring in economics and sociology.

This is the sound of me throwing on an empty baseball field just down the road from my house. I hadn’t thrown for a few days at this point and I’m at ease with the way my arm is treating me. I’m throwing harder than usual. Maybe it’s stress. It probably is. My last competitive outing as a relief pitcher for my high school baseball team was March 5, more than a month ago. I don’t remember the exact specifics or even the final score.

Unfortunately, that game doesn’t count anymore. It’s not my main concern. The vast and ruinous spread of COVID-19 not only canceled my senior baseball season for good but also prematurely ended my entire baseball career.

We were getting ready for a Friday night contest under the lights in Burlingame, California, 20 minutes south of San Francisco. We don’t play many evening games, which makes them adored and enjoyed by parents, coaches and players. The festive mood was highlighted by food and drinks as we patiently waited for the junior varsity game before ours to wrap up. So when the news leaked that the , our seemingly normal heartbeats went up a notch.

There was a 30 percent chance of rain going into the game. Now, there was a 110 percent chance of utter fear and apprehension.

“Something feels odd. Something is going to happen,” I told a teammate before the game.”I have a strange vibe right now.”

Let it be known that I don’t read palms and am probably less enticed to after this saga, but something was legitimately bothering me. During our pregame quad-pulls exercise, one of the coaches approached me and underscored what I was thinking.

“Hey, this isn’t looking good right now. Don’t tell anyone; keep warming up,” he said. “But it looks like they’re going to shut us down.”

However disappointed, we quickly understood that the magnitude of our situation was extremely far from what our basketball team was going through that evening. Before their playoff bout against a beatable team, the game was unplugged and postponed due to the school’s COVID-19 connection. When it was revealed later that a student tested positive for the virus, the basketball team’s entire season was snatched from them by league officials. One of the school’s will never again have their day on the hardwood, and it’s a tough pill to swallow.

Stuff happens, though. We weren’t in the basketball team’s shoes; we weren’t stranded on a cruise ship; we didn’t have grandparents suffering to breathe. We didn’t have any of that, yet we were concerned about not playing baseball.

It’s a gut punch, but if I were in the position to run any type of spring sporting league, I’d shut us down too. Heck, worrying about baseball at this point seems almost useless. People are dying, depressed and scared.

I don’t even know what day it is today. Every morning, every afternoon, every evening — it’s all, well, the same. Never has Yogi Berra’s famous quote about “déjà vu all over again” seemed more apt.

It’s been a long while since I’ve been at home for this many consecutive long, dull days. I’ve started a routine where I wake up every morning, rip the covers in a flash, and look in the mirror to see if I’m Bill Murray in Groundhog Day yet.

The events that have taken place after California’s shelter-in-place order have turned out to be a little less adventurous and a little more mind-wrecking.

I’ve struggled to work on my baseball skills. I’ve thrown a handful of times, but I don’t think I’ve even swung a bat once. My workouts are abbreviated, sometimes nonexistent. It’s difficult to become motivated when everything heard around you has the opposite effect. Around this time during the season, I would be completely energized every morning, ready to work out. I often used my senior physical education class to complete my two required workouts during the week.

At home, the distractions are endless. Falling into television land, scrolling through social media, unneeded eating at random hours of the day are all potential pitfalls. Although I still feel healthy enough to play right now, the void baseball leaves in my life creates ongoing “could haves” and “should haves” in terms of working out.

The fact that everything is a huge question mark is frightening. The fact that I might not have a regular graduation is cringeworthy. The very slim possibility that I may graduate walking across my living room on Zoom scares me to death, almost as if four years of hard work has virtually no reward.

I don’t know if I’ll have the opportunity to walk across the theater stage to receive my diploma on May 24, a tradition that has occurred for 70 years at my San Francisco high school. I’m disappointed that I’ll never play organized baseball again, as I enter college to pursue a broadcasting and journalism career. My silver lining through all of this is knowing that the relationships that I created through baseball, like teammates and coaches, will last well into adulthood and beyond.

I fell in love with baseball in third grade and never looked back. At a young age, I stunk in Little League but got better after endless hours of throwing a tennis ball against my garage, swinging a bat a million times and watching to learn as much of the sport as possible. I love the way the dirt smells, the sound of cleats crunching crisply against pavement, the ball hitting the mitt. It’s a game of feels and sounds, which is beyond calming.

Being part of a team has helped me learn key attributes that I can utilize as I enter adulthood, such as humility, confidence, leadership and respect.

I love baseball because anything can happen. The best team could destroy the worst team one day, and it could be the other way around the next. It reminds me about the reality of our current moment. Yeah, I’m upset, I’m disappointed, but I’ve come to terms with it. After all, life is 50 percent random. This time around, life just happened to throw me a curveball. What happens when you get thrown a curveball in baseball? You wait back, square it up and hit the thing 450 feet to dead center field. Of course, it’s far more complicated than that, which is why we need to work together on killing off this pandemic. It takes more than one.

An old coach once told me that the 11th commandment is to “find a way.” Now, I’m not sure if Moses came up with that, but it fits many situations in life that need conquering.

COVID-19 could use some conquering.

I’m going to follow the rules and make the most of these rough times. After all, my actions might help save a life or two.

That’s what matters.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

I had been grieving the end of my Ultimate Frisbee season. This year — my senior season — was going to be our team’s chance to win a second straight Division I collegiate national championship. Finding out that we wouldn’t see the payoff of our work was a tough pill to swallow.

But I was missing the bigger picture, and my housemate’s words woke me up. He had just lost 10 months of work coordinating our university’s spring concert series in the blink of an eye. And more importantly, the world outside our college community was coming apart at the seams: Unemployment rates had already begun to , and medical professionals were reusing disposable masks in . Everyone had losses to grieve, and the best thing we could do was to support each other through a difficult time.

In the weeks since, I have felt surprising solidarities form over the shared difficulty of adjusting to our socially distant, mostly virtual world.

Of course, the pandemic has different effects on everyone. I was in an advantageous position compared to many peers. I was able to go back to the rural Vermont town I grew up in, which now feels like something of a refuge. What about my classmates who feel threatened at home, for whom university was a safe haven? What about those who live thousands of miles away from campus? What about students who had families relying on their on-campus income? This tragedy affects all of us differently, with disproportionate threats to those already vulnerable.

Yet paradoxically, at the same time, the virus also puts many of us in the same boat. We’re stuck inside, bored, and unsure of what the future may hold. Previously, I may have tried to avoid most social media, but now digital connectivity has begun to offer an unexpected solace. I, along with , am laughing at memes about Tiger King on Netflix. I’m watching Cardi B’s Instagram . I’m sending videos to friends of Rube Goldberg-esque quarantine of ping-pong balls bouncing through halls and down stairs to their eventual target. Though absolutely no one is glad for the circumstances, our country has never had so much shared content to connect us.

In classes also, I’ve seen the challenging circumstances bring people closer. Two weeks ago, my religious studies professor sent out a poem that described the pandemic as a reminder to us all “that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.” And a few days ago, my biostatistics professor began class by introducing everyone to her 1-year-old child, who gave the webcam a confused stare.

These intimacies make me smile. But of course, I still don’t know what to make of this world I’m supposed to enter after graduation. I’m in the fortunate position of having finished my job search, but many peers are trying to plan their future at a time when the coming months are unknown. I’ve seen a spreadsheet on Facebook that supposedly offers insight on which companies are still hiring and which ones have frozen their programs. The world may be ending, but apparently the job search isn’t.

Even though “normal” has gone out the window, everyone is still trying to do the best they can for themselves and for each other. I feel a sense of solidarity, even in isolation. These past weeks, I have been immersed in my honors thesis project on a personalized learning initiative in my home state of Vermont. Every 10 pages or so, I’ll text an update to my thesis writing buddy. At school, we used to have a weekly writing date for mutual accountability. Now, text updates stand in for check-ins whispered between our desks at the Rockefeller Library. There will be no presentation of our thesis findings, save perhaps for a Zoom forum, but we push on regardless because … what other choice do we have? We do what we can with the situation at hand.

One imagined scene motivates me above all else to keep pushing: our commencement, inevitably belated. It’s October 2020, and the trees on my university’s main green are just starting to tinge orange. Rows of folding chairs fill the quad. A crowd of students in robes and tassels wait on the street down the hill, getting ready to walk through the gates. We all came back from jobs and grad schools for this weekend. Not everyone is here, but those who couldn’t make the trip appear on phone screens over FaceTime. We smile and embrace each other easily, with the sense that, together, we have overcome something. Daylight starts to fade, the air starts to chill, and we shuffle into place, readying ourselves to walk through the gates.

In this time of uncertainty, we’re all we have. What’s important comes into focus. And together, we will make it through, with the help of Zoom calls, check-in texts and Joe Exotic.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

My parents pulled me out of this school after third grade because they felt I wasn’t receiving the education I needed and sent me to the one I attend now, a college-prep private high school, which is academically very rigorous. My current educational environment is one without goats, surrounded by fields without magic. Like most students, I take standardized tests and do chemistry projects. I learn grammar and calculus and conjugate Spanish verbs. We talk about college entrance exams and career goals. All very practical. But despite all that, until several weeks ago, I learned face-to-face with my teachers and fellow students, gossiped with my friends at lunch, played volleyball or did yoga in gym class, and was surrounded by a learning community.

As a 10th-grader living in the hard-hit New York metro area during the COVID-19 crisis, I find that my educational life has changed dramatically. I have been doing all-day online classes and coursework, meant to replicate the experience of being in school. And it is at this time that I can’t help remembering my tactile childhood education and wondering if there aren’t more fruitful and less stressful ways to learn.

Sitting in front of my computer for seven hours a day, constantly going in and out of Zoom video classes, I have found it difficult to actively engage with my academic materials without real-life interaction with my peers, teachers and community. With only my mother and older brother in the house, respectively involved in teaching and learning online, it has been isolating and lonely. The practice of social distancing has helped me realize that active engagement in a learning community is one of the most important aspects of an education. Physical activity, whether doing lab experiments in science, shooting videos for art or solving math problems on a whiteboard, helps make learning real. Engagement in outdoor spaces makes education meaningful, while self-isolation has made my academic life feel caged in. Only a few months ago, in science class, we released monarch butterflies outside, after they hatched in our classroom. Maybe mistaking my bright orange sweater for a flower, one landed on my shoulder for a moment before flying away. I miss those small, beautiful moments of tangible learning.

The COVID-19 crisis has been not only a deterioration of an engaging learning experience but also a time filled with worry and concern. We wash our hands, and we wash them again. We stand six feet apart. We calculate whether leaving the house, even for a walk, is worth the risk. My father is a practicing physician at a major hospital, and although he is not in direct contact with COVID-19 patients, many of his colleagues are sick. Therefore, isolation has been even more anxiety-provoking and scary. I worry for his health, and also for my brother, a high school senior, and whether he will miss out on graduation. I worry for myself whether I will be able to be a good candidate for college with new systems of AP testing and this “lost” semester. Will I be able to perform well on at-home, 45-minute free response AP tests? Will I perform as well in my online classes as I did when we were actually at school?

I realize now that even in my college-prep school, learning emerges from physical togetherness, creative freedom and tangible experience. Education is not only about transferring information from teacher to student but also creating experiences in an environment where students can teach themselves. English class is about the rules of grammar, yes, but also about learning how to think critically in a group of peers, express opinions and listen actively to others. It is not the antiseptic lessons themselves that matter so much as getting our hands dirty in tangible learning. After this crisis is over, is there a way to value the importance of tactile, physical learning even more, realizing that the digital world can never substitute for (metaphorical, virus-free) dirt under our fingernails?

I remember my first-grade playmates and our collective magic. I remember being dirty and playing impractical games. I remember climbing trees and dreaming. These wild memories of another place and time sustain me and remind me that even in these scary months, we can still create the world and educational system we want and need.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.