109 Studying Through Zoom: COVID and Learning Through A Pandemic
Anonymous
At the time COVID hit, I was 33 years old studying at McMaster university. I was living in Ancaster in a house with my parents. My house basically went into full time lockdown; mostly because my mother had active caregiving duties elsewhere and the last thing that anyone wanted was for Covid to be transmitted from healthy individuals to less healthy people. I think also that the dominant worry was that someone would get it and that it would spread through the house like wildfire. The other thing I remember the most is the fear and uncertainty at the beginning of the pandemic: what is this disease, where did it come from, who are the people getting infected and most importantly how are they getting infected? To make it worse, there was conflicting information being provided at the outset of the pandemic: do we need to wash absolutely everything? If the at-home test said that we had COVID, what was the tipping point for hospital admission, given that this new disease left some people with minor sickness and others rapidly declined in health? If someone gets sick with something that might be COVID, is it safe to go to the doctors where others might be even worse off than you, and they may or may not be wearing masks? Everyone in my household had the ability to work or do school from home for the first few months of the pandemic. My other day-to-day changes included disinfecting high touch areas in the house, getting the groceries from pickup and wiping them down, and keeping a running list of cleaning supplies that were needed in order to disinfect areas that were used more often. I also helped to run groceries and cleaning supplies to my grandmother.
My biggest challenges during this time were keeping my grades from tanking, as online learning was not something I was very familiar with at the time, and acting as a part time caregiver for someone in my family. One of the good things that came out of the pandemic was that I got a break from commuting to and from school; I could catch up on work that would have been lost to commuting time, and also catch up on my sleep.
My biggest regret was that before COVID hit, I was making plans to study abroad in Europe- which then exploded in my face as COVID had shut down the study abroad program. This was a huge disappointment for me because I had gotten everything ready and then it was postponed indefinitely at the time. Sadly, my circumstances had changed by the time that the study abroad program opened up again, meaning that it was an activity that I unfortunately missed out on.
Virtual learning was a huge challenge for me-I was not proficient in Zoom or Teams before the pandemic and it felt like I was now in crisis mode trying to learn the ins and outs of this method of interacting with my teachers and my peers. I also found that I was not as engaged with my tutorials as I probably should have been during this time. Working from home for such a long time, coupled with the uncertainty and stresses from the pandemic, was a new situation and it definitely affected my focus on my studies, which was not something that I was expecting to happen. I had foolishly thought that I would have been able to push through when the world felt like it was falling apart. I think that the long-term impacts of virtual schooling on me were that I ended up not taking participation in my online courses seriously; to the point where if we had to go online again, I think that my grades would drop dramatically.
Some of the cultural changes I feel have occurred due to COVID are that wearing masks has become more normalized. For many but not all, mask wearing became second nature during the pandemic. Another change related directly to COVID was the rise of remote work, and the flexibility that came with it.
A course theme I can see that echoed throughout my experience was fear, especially during the early days when we did not have all of the information that we do now. This fear manifested in some surprising ways: watching TV was now not an enjoyable activity as many of the images, like streets that were almost apocalyptically empty, were a reminder of how much things had gone off the rails outside of my home. The news on TV and on the internet was dominated by the case counts, and while I was interested in knowing this information, it also highlighted that this was a vast and quickly spreading disease. I also avoided any news articles that depicted people in hospitals, as it terrified me that someone I cared about could end up on a ventilator. Oddly enough, playing video games that put me into the same sort of situations that I was dealing with in reality helped; I couldn’t do anything or stop anyone who I cared about from getting ill in the real world, however in the survival world games that I immersed myself in I had the power to stop others from getting sick or cure those that had become ill. I didn’t really think about it at the time, but I now realize that this was my way of coping with the uncertainty and fear surrounding an illness that might cause someone I cared about to become seriously ill or even die. Despite all of this, I definitely gained an appreciation for how resilient and adaptable humans can be when faced with a novel situation such as COVID.
