Covid-19. Everyone born before or during the time I’m writing this article has probably heard this infamous name before. Covid-19 is a virus that nobody really knows how it originated, but affected essentially the entire world by shutting everything down. From multi-million dollar department stores to a mom and pop store to amusement parks, everything was shut down. But how did it affect school life?

       I remember the day very well. My science teacher told us to take our stuff from our lockers home because of a virus spreading around. I got home and chilled out on a swing set I have in my backyard when my older brother came outside and told me the news. Now my brother can be sort of a jokester, so when he told me school was canceled for two weeks I thought he was pranking me. Until I saw the message myself, and saw that something I thought would be gone in a week, started to destroy the things around me. I originally thought let’s go two weeks of break, until I saw that places I liked, like a restaurant I went to or a bookstore, started closing down simply because covid was here. Little did we know, it was here to stay.

       My first year at Westfield was the infamous online year. Online started and ended badly, and the only upside to being online was I could sleep and eat a snack whenever I wanted to(also caught up on some pretty good shows). How about going in person the second part of the year? It was… really bad. There was barely anyone in the school as some teachers just stayed online because why risk getting covid and going to school? It didn’t help as it was mostly one person to a class, and there were the “amazing” one way signs that just made life harder.

      In the words of my boss, in regards to the online year: “It was really easy.” However, that leads to the issue: the 2021-2022 school year. During the online year teachers made the curriculum easy as nobody was used to online school. Since we are now back in person, and class difficulty is returning to normal, most kids aren’t ready for the change back. This led to lots of people not being used to the sudden difficulty spike, and led many people(definitely not one of them) to fall behind on class work as it felt overwhelming compared to the previous year.

      Now, as I am writing this, we are nearing the end of the 2022-2023 school year, and everything feels different. Nothing feels the same anymore as some people don’t remember life before covid. A teacher or some random youtube video once told me something that I think fits this really well: “Covid is like a folded piece of paper. You can unfold it all you want but no matter how many times you try to unfold it, that fold will always be there, permanently.” So while Covid is no longer considered a public health emergency, and as we move on with our lives think about it: did we ever truly move on from covid.