AMARAH GHORI
Assistant Opinion Editor
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected so many lives across the globe.
As a 2021 high school graduate, I too can attest to the difficulties many students have faced when adjusting to in-person learning post-COVID-19.
Students and teachers have been suffering since the pandemic to readjust to in-person learning. Students aren’t used to learning from the same teaching methods teachers used pre-COVID-19, causing students to fall behind on their curriculum, which in return causes an increase in mental health concerns for students.
Mental health has gotten worse for students, giving an explanation as to why learning has been harder for them post-COVID-19. For teachers, adjusting to a new teaching style tailored to students who were affected academically during the pandemic, has been rather difficult as well.
As Megan Kuhfeld et al. wrote in a 2022 Brookings Institution commentary on the decline in achievement, “Even more concerning, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20% in math (corresponding to 0.20 SDs) and 15% in reading (0.13 SDs), primarily during the 2020-21 school year.” SD stands for standard deviation.
Achievement in school is going down and it’s up to us to figure out what can be done.
Teachers and administrators have begun to notice a developmental difference among the students who had their primary years of learning cut off for online Zoom learning during COVID-19. These students who have come out of COVID-19 learning aren’t comprehending their curriculum in the same way as students did pre-pandemic.
This is a scary thing to think about. How will students be able to catch up? Are school leaders going to have to adjust their teaching methods to make up for this “lost” time?
A news article by the Harvard Graduate School of Education (May, 2023), stated that, “Test scores declined more in places where the COVID death rate was higher, in communities where adults reported feeling more depression and anxiety during the pandemic, and where daily routines of families were most significantly restricted. This is true even in places where schools closed only very briefly at the start of the pandemic.”
After getting the chance to interview a few middle school teachers at different levels, I was able to get a better understanding of their experiences. I first spoke with Amanda Cendrowski, who is a fifth-grade math teacher at the Buffalo Academy of Science Middle School.
Cendrowski had a lot to say about the changes in learning post-COVID-19. She felt that students were “academically lower” than they were pre-pandemic. Cendrowski also noted that when students went back to school they “lacked a strong understanding of basic skills,” skills which they should’ve learned in prior school years.
I also spoke with Marta Ulinger, a seventh and eighth-grade science teacher at the Buffalo Academy of Science. Ulinger brought up a great point about kids wanting to put less effort into the work that they do. She thinks that students prefer using “less energy [and] put less effort” into their work post-COVID-19. Ulinger speaks of the fact that these students could use Google and the teachers became the ones that did a lot of the work for them.
This is not something that is talked about enough. Students had to adjust to new ways of learning their material and it’s hard to do that without in-person instruction. These students fell back onto Google, and since then, that has become an easy outlet for them to get their work done. That’s not the greatest thing for them. Critical thinking skills could get lost because of this and that’s something that a lot of students have to come back from now in the post-COVID-19 world.
Not only have students and teachers have suffered, but the parents have as well, of course.
Parents and their involvement in their child’s learning in the midst of the pandemic had an impact on how their child continued to learn while schools were shut down. During the rise of COVID-19, some people lost their jobs, some people were working from home and on top of this, parents had to suddenly deal with having their kids stay at home when they needed to get work done. Regardless of whether they were okay with it or not, this took individuals out of their normal routine.
How can we help people adjust to life after the pandemic? Will it ever go back to normal?
Perry Stein, writing in the Washington Post (September, 2021), talks about the delays of students. She really puts into perspective how many years of learning children and students have lost to COVID-19. “Preschoolers in the spring of 2020 are now in the first grade. Pre-pandemic fourth-graders are now in middle school. And 2020’s tweens in the seventh grade are weeks into their freshman year of high school.”
Stein continues, “Last spring, education leaders said they knew it would take time for students to readjust to sitting in a classroom all day. Teachers of the youngest learners say their students had been out of school for so long that they didn’t remember how to line up at the door.”
One second-grade teacher said that after more than a year at home, she notices her children crave alone time more. When she gives them quiet time to read or write, they now want to go beyond the allotted time.
This is something so mind-boggling. At the earliest stages of life, children and their social interactions are important in teaching and shaping their young minds.
Students aren’t able to do tasks like usual and yes, they will hopefully adjust, but it’s something that will continue to affect them for a long while. Students aren’t even used to having to listen to their own teachers, as their teachers weren’t able to give them full instructions to follow during the process of online learning.
When you think about it, students were able to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Yes, in a lot of ways that was helpful to them while being at home, but they got used to this norm, that’s not necessarily a norm at school.
In-person school is very structured. Students have certain times that they can eat, certain times to go outside and certain times to work on different projects for class. When they were at home, structure wasn’t something that they needed.
Mental health comes into play for this as well. Let’s take a moment to think about an older generation.
College students are suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Seniors in high school in 2020 were also the same students who were affected when going to college.
Enrollment has fallen for students going into college since COVID-19. Because of the decline in learning since the pandemic, fewer and fewer students have decided to further their education and attend college.
In a Washington Post article by Nick Anderson from 2022, he speaks about the enrollment rates going down in correlation to COVID-19.
Anderson interviewed Doug Shapiro, who is the executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. “Shapiro said the initial data suggest that steep drops after the pandemic disrupted colleges globally in early 2020 have not been reversed. Many high school graduates in 2020 and 2021 who ordinarily would have gone to college did not. And they might never do so.”
How does this affect our communities? How will this affect the world when three separate years of students decided not to go to college? Would these students have had a different outlook on furthering their education if COVID-19 and Zoom learning weren’t a thing?
This is something that needs to be further discussed.
The same article by Anderson for the Washington Post stated that maybe this fall in students attending college could also be related to jobs. Anderson says, “When the economy booms and jobs are plentiful, many young people will delay going to college.”
The pandemic made a lot of people have to change their routines and the result is that we as a society have to work that much harder to get back on track. In order to fix the disconnect between students and teachers, we must acknowledge that students need to be able to be nourished in a real-life school setting to be able to grow. These changes that we’re seeing will not be resolved unless they’re given proper attention, whether that’s by parents or school administrators.