Category: Et Cetera

Well, I survived a whole week of distance learning and social distancing. If you did too, congratulations (I guess?), and I hope you made it through the week alright.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how different this year has already been compared to last year. 2019 was probably the best year of my life, and, while I know it could always be worse, this year is shaping up to a pretty crappy one so far. I just hope it gets better over the next nine months.

Today was a good day, though. It was Friday, so my classes were relaxed and fun. In Italian, my teacher did a cooking lesson in her kitchen on cacio e pepe. Even when we’re at school, she occasionally will bring in a hot plate and prepare a dish for us all which is one of my favorite parts of the class. At the end of the lesson today, she told us how she had meant to do this with us all at school and that she was so sad that we weren’t able to taste it. 😦

In piano, we had a “show and tell,” and most people showed their pets, so that was really fun. When we’re actually in school, we don’t always have a lot of time for bonding and learning about each other, so the little things we’ve done through online learning have made me feel a lot more connected to my classmates and teachers. God, I know I say this in *literally* every blog post, but I really, really, really want to go back to school.

Aside from my schoolday, I started preparing a new sourdough recipe. I’m really anxious to see how it turns out, but I’ll find out tomorrow morning after I bake it! I was thinking of doing a post all about my sourdough journey sometime this weekend since I won’t be doing one of these blogs til Monday. There’s a lot to talk about, so stay tuned!

My happy thing for today is Trey Kennedy’s YouTube channel.  I just watched three or four of his older videos after forgetting about him completely, and they made me laugh so hard. They’re just really goofy and scarily accurate, so check them out if you need a laugh.

That’s all I have for today. Always remember that Friday is the best day of the week; try to make yours a good one, even through all of this craziness.

I’ll start today off with a happy piece of entertainment. The Guardian just released their ranked list of David Bowie’s greatest songs. While it’s missing a couple of my favorites (e.g. Soul Love and Lady Grinning Soul), this is a solid list. Here’s a link to the actual playlist on Spotify. Happy listening!

Also, not school-related: I am becoming more and more irritable stuck inside my house every day, but I also don’t want to leave. I have been keeping myself busy, yes, but I dream of going to the beach with my friends.

Anyway…now onto day five. 

Today we received an email from the administration at my school. It contained a couple of updates regarding eLearning. The first was that, as of now, May 4th is the earliest possible date of our return. The second was that we will now only have formal classes Monday – Thursday; Fridays will be “office hours” for teachers, so we can meet with them if we want, but we’ll be given an assignment on Thursday to work on over the weekend.

So online learning is kind of the new norm, at least for the next month or so. The potential May 4th date was encouraging, although I’m sad we’ll be out of school for all of April. But, say we do come back on that day: we’d still have an entire month left until graduation which would be so wonderful. I’m trying not to be too optimistic because that date was only tentative, but I can only hope that it remains true.

Before classes today, I had a Women’s Leadership club meeting. It was really nice to be able to talk to all of my friends in the club and to our awesome advisor. Then, after school, we had a student council meeting which went really well. Since most of our events and plans aren’t going to be happening anymore, we began brainstorming ideas of virtual things we can do to keep the school community connected. There were some really great ideas that left me feeling excited and inspired.

I’m happy that most of the clubs I’m in are continuing to meet. It’s great to talk to my teachers and classmates, but since I’m so involved with clubs at my school, it would be weird to go without them for so long. Club meetings always make me feel very accomplished, even if we just chat about potential ideas for the future, and feeling like I’ve accomplished something while stuck in my house is exactly what I need.

This whole thing has made me realize so many things, but one I never really pondered before was how special my school community is. I seem to always focus on all the things that go wrong or that I dislike about my school. Maybe that’s just because I’m a teenager and it’s just the way my mind works, but this situation has made me see how connected my community is and how well everyone works together.

I know that not all schools are like this, and for that, I feel very lucky. If I could wave a magic wand and give every school the same opportunities and capabilities, I would. All I know is that once we all return to, many of my peers will have a similar mindset about our school. And even though I’m graduating this year, I look forward to seeing how this setback leads to positive growth and change, both in my school and in the world as a whole.

Have a great night.

After a productive and decent day yesterday, I woke up more motivated and excited to work. Then, during Italian, I received an email from my school saying that it’s unlikely that we’ll be returning back to school, and if we do, it will only be for a few days.

All of my friends immediately started texting, sharing screenshots of the email and completely losing all hope. I could barely focus on my Italian lesson; it all felt like a dream I was going to wake up from shortly.

In Ceramics, my teacher updated us and told us his thoughts about the email. He’s worried and sad for us all (mostly everyone in my class is a senior) and told us all how sorry he is that we may have to cancel prom and other fun senior events. Everyone’s microphone was muted, and when he was done speaking, no one responded. I think we were all either crying and/or about to cry at this point.

In Piano, after a lesson on minor chords and 7th chords, my teacher talked about how our recital will most-likely not happen either. Another disappointment that we can only hope turns out to be false.

It was really hard to get through my classes after that ominous email. It all happened so fast that none of it feels real. A week ago I was in school, happy with all my friends and teachers and attending clubs. I never thought that life would look like this back then.

Speaking of clubs, I’m on the executive board of the student council, and we decided to continue meeting every Tuesday and Thursday after school to make things feel a little more normal. While we don’t really have any urgent planning to do for events (such as the blood drive, which is most definitely not happening!), it still feels good to talk to everyone and discuss possibilities for community building… while quarantined.

But I haven’t given up hope completely. Nothing is official and nothing has been confirmed about school and/or events yet, so I’m going to live on that last little grain of hope until we’re given final answers.

Anyway, my piece of entertainment for today is a movie!!! I follow Kumail Nanjiani on Twitter, and he recently tweeted this which reminded me of his movie from a few years back, The Big Sick. I actually watched it for the first time last year, and it’s fantastic. Like, top-notch dramedy. If you need something to watch, I highly recommend this one which you can find on Amazon Prime.

I’m gonna try to get some sleep. Let’s all try to make tomorrow a good day. I hope everyone who’s reading this is doing well and staying inside as much as possible. Goodnight!