Pandemic’s impact on the youth

For this semester, I am assigned to teach writing for mass media in a class of 32 first-year students divided into two sections. Classes in the college where I teach part-time started last March 1 and is scheduled to end on June 11.

Because of the continuing pandemic, classes this semester are still fully online. Despite a semester of online teaching experience from last year, the whole thing still seems uncharted territory for most teachers.

As for me, I was both excited and fearful of the possibilities. I soon learned that the most challenging part was not learning and navigating through the technological tools of online teaching. The most challenging part was to adjust to the individual circumstances of the students.

There were those with problematic internet connection. Others had to share cramped learning quarters at home with their siblings. Some had to adjust to the reality of jobless parents because of the pandemic. On the other hand, there were the few lucky ones who live in a large house where each sibling had a learning room and there were no issues with internet connectivity.

Given these, I had to customize my teaching methods depending on a student’s situation. I wanted to fully harness the advantages of real-time exchanges that synchronous learning through videoconference allows, particularly for students with good internet connectivity. But for those who were often interrupted by intermittent internet access, I either had to assign asynchronous tasks or schedule makeup class sessions.

Last semester was sort of a tug-of-war of balancing between quality and compassion, as I sensed resistance from students regarding my teaching methods. I did adjust my methods on a case-to-case basis but one thing I pressed hard on my students was that I will never be persuaded to give grades that they don’t deserve. I told them that one way or another, we have to pull together here, helping one another without giving anyone a free pass.

“Was I compassionate enough?” I asked myself as the semester wrapped up last December. I was half-expecting a backlash in my SET or Student Evaluation of Teaching rating. But modesty aside, my students gave me an ‘Excellent’ rating. The synchronous interactions helped to keep them engaged, while the asynchronous activities allowed them some degree of independent learning within a manageable timeline.

That, however, does not erase the fact that we are still in uncharted territory in this remote learning setup. We have to go back to in-person classes as soon as it is safe to do so, at least the limited or hybrid online and face-to-face type. But that’s still not practicable right now because we have even yet to start mass vaccinations to achieve herd immunity.

There is already a lot to worry in terms of controlling the rampaging COVID variants. Yet this semester in my writing class impressed upon me another worrying fact; the negative impact of the pandemic on the youth. I can sense it in the inner voice that comes out of my students’ weekly blog articles.

It wrenches the heart when one describes how the pandemic robbed her high school batch of a proper send-off from senior high. Miss L wrote: “We were robbed of an event of our lives that we can never get back… No words said, no graduation, no grad party, no final hurrah, just the start of an isolated year disguised as a two-week class suspension, followed by sad online commencement rites.”

Miss K described the social contact she missed through her love for coffee: “Amid the loneliness, I feel like coffee helped me keep sane. Its smell made me feel like I’m in a coffee house with my friends sharing our stories for the day.”

Miss A wrote about getting distracted by the noise from her mom who is on the phone and the distant sound of San Miguel bottles tinkling against each other. “This is the sound of my family, even as the shape of our living arrangement changes like the sky when it nears the storm.”

For Mister C, a box of steaming crispy chicken nuggets fresh off the deep fat fryer from a once-busy fast-food joint would have been an appetizing sight. “This was not like most days, unfortunately.”

Where I felt free and ready to conquer the world at the age of 19, Mister C feels trapped. “The virus still has most of us in a cage,” he wrote.