Learning Experience

A few weeks later, I came back to school. The words COVID-19 had never crossed my mind. I went to classes, in person and barefaced, as per the norm up until this year. It was over Spring Break, the beginning of March, that I started hearing about the virus. It was described as a global pandemic, but I still hadn’t seen it. I traveled up and down the East Coast, enjoying my week away from classes and responsibilities. It started popping up where I went, first in Massachusetts and then in Maryland. As we drove back to Emmitsburg, colleges across the country were telling students to leave for spring break and not come back. Two days after we returned, the Mount made a similar statement; we had until the weekend to get out.

My last memory of normalcy at the Mount was a basketball game. I was wearing a Hawaiian button-up with palm trees over the team shirt. We had filled the fan section, squished together to fit all our friends. I don’t remember if we won or lost the game, but I remember my friend and I hugging.

It hasn’t felt quite the same since then. It’s the same Mount St. Mary’s that I got accepted into roughly two years ago. It’s the same buildings with the same people, albeit some are Zooming in from their homes and dorms. It’s the same sense of peace that you get from driving up Route 15 and suddenly Mary appears from between the trees. But so much has changed and it’s too much to even categorize.

I have had a cotton swab shoved up my nose five times, which is a sentence I never thought I’d write. The only place I can be barefaced and not nervous about it is in my dorm room, the place where I do everything now. I don’t remember what a full classroom looks like. There are no dances or parties or big events on campus. We can’t even do service trips, at a time when they’re probably needed most.

Education itself has been affected. There is not a single person who will tell you that Zoom or hybrid learning is the same education as in-person pre-COVID-19. The attitude about learning has changed fundamentally and I’m very worried that it won’t shift back. With the ease of online learning, the ‘learning’ side of it has been lost. It isn’t about retention, it’s about completion. Out of fear of being too harsh in a time where people are struggling with the pandemic in their own ways, schools everywhere have been too lax with the structure of education in the latter half of 2020. I have at least one in-person class a day and I don’t feel like I’m learning anything; I can’t imagine what students who are one-hundred-percent remote feel like. Online learning is not the solution to the long-term problem COVID-19 might present. The job of educators everywhere will be to find a way to bring learning back to the forefront of education, especially in university settings. I think that is what has marked this semester the most and everyone has felt the effects of this. Students aren’t engaged in the classroom, even when they’re in person, and teachers are not seeing the fruits of their works in their pupil’s minds. This is discouraging and exhausting for everyone: Why teach if they won’t learn? Why learn if they won’t teach?

I don’t know what the solution is. The pandemic surges on and we’re threatened with more closures and a revamp of safety measures. I will socially distance. I will wear a mask. I will go another semester with no break, although I won’t do it without complaining. I will have cotton swabs shoved up my nose, over and over again, until this thing is over. I miss the normalcy, but most of all, I miss college. I miss talking to professors after class when the discussion was so good that it spills over into office hours and café meetings. I miss genuine class discourse, where everyone is in the room and no one is a black screen in the back of the class. I miss talking to my friends about what I’m reading about in textbooks and expanding my knowledge of other disciplines. We’ve waxed poetic about the social and mental implications of the pandemic, but I worry about the educational and institutional ones. There is only so much control we let the pandemic have over us before we decide that there are things in life that we aren’t willing to sacrifice. For me, education is one of them.

I’m greatly looking forward to next semester. After grappling with pandemic precautions and the potential for closure for the past four months, the university is prepared to deal with any rise in cases and more intense regulations. With our minds finally at ease in that area, we can turn our focus to other aspects of the pandemic. The goal of the fall semester was to survive; I would like to see the spring semester focused on how we can thrive. As a community, we have persevered through overwhelming odds as schools around us went remote. If any institution can restore the fundamentals of education, it’s this one.

Next semester will look very similar to this one: tables spaced apart in the dining hall, classes half full and half empty, and faces covered in cloth and surgical masks. As the winter months set in, the campus is uncomfortably quiet with everyone tucked away in their dorms. I hope the mountain doesn’t get too lonely without students for the next two months; I hope students don’t get too lonely away from the mountain. And I hope, someday in the not-too-distant future, we can start hugging again.