The COVID-19 pandemic changed and shaped many things in our lives today. From the way we learn, act, socialize, and more. While everyone relates to all of these topics to some degree, many students will probably agree that their relationship to school attendance changed since the pandemic. The article by the NY Times reports that 26 percent of students were chronically absent last school year, up 15 percent before the pandemic. While reading the article, I could relate to my relationship with school attendance changing.
Since elementary school, I was the type of student who never wanted to miss a day of school since I thought perfect attendance was the goal of school and somehow made me a cooler kid. Since reading this article, I reflected on my relationship with classes during COVID. I didn’t pay attention in class and often took naps in my off periods in between classes. I think this part changed my learning as I wasn’t putting as much attention into classes and often wanted to nap more. It made me more relaxed about my attendance and if I missed any classes for something that I deemed was “an important issue” or “this might not happen but classes will happen tomorrow” then I didn’t care. Since my high school and parents were pretty strict on attendance, I didn’t skip classes but once I went to college it changed. I don’t skip classes just because I don’t want to go to them, but if something happens and I’m unable to go to class it’s not that big of a deal for me anymore. For example, the eclipse was during my stat class (this class was two classes before a big test) and I decided to skip my class to go see the eclipse because “the eclipse won’t happen for another twenty or so years but stat class will come Wednesday”.
I agree, during covid I didn’t really pay much attention to my classes but it changed once in person classes started again
I would also agree that because everyone was at home during covid it really hurt how people learned because I could say that personally I was not paying attention as much because the classes were on a zoom call. Additionally I think this affected peopled when they came back to in person because people were so used to not having to put in a lot of work for school.
I agree that ever since the pandemic, I have become more lazy. Especially during the pandemic, where online classes were a thing, I rarely paid any attention and was just on my phone or playing games the whole time.
I agree that online learning has made it harder for us to concentrate and learn the course material. The pandemic has provided us with more experience in online learning, but it has also brought challenges in maintaining focus and making us feel lazy.
I agree with the other comments and your answer, it has been incredibly hard to focus and be motivated to go to school ever since the online school became a thing. I personally loved online school and transitioning back to in person school was really hard for me.