Benedict Huszar / Edge columnist
Although most people are sick of hearing about Covid-19, it’s positive to look back at what school used to be like during the height of the pandemic.
The Canadian government began to take action during spring break 2020 and many students including myself, struggled to get back home and many exchange students didn’t return. There was a roughly two-month break before we heard anything from SD43 about remote learning. To say that online classes were off to a rough start would be an understatement. Getting into meetings with our teachers wasn’t too hard but teachers figuring out how they wanted to format lessons and assignments did take more than a few tries. Teachers had to go from using Microsoft Teams as an educational aid to relying on it and structuring their entire classes around it.
The 2019/20 school year ended uneventfully, but for the 2020/21, we were going to be back to in person classes. All be it in a somewhat confusing “quarter system” where we had four shorter semesters with two classes each instead of the normal two semesters. This was done to reduce the number of students in the school at one time. Masks were mandatory at all times inside the building, the cafeteria was closed and there was no lunch block because we were out of school by 2:00pm.
This past school year felt brand new when it started despite being a return to the old normal before the pandemic despite the mask mandate not being lifted quite yet. We went back to our old schedule and semester system and greatly increased our socialization in class.
Despite Covid still being very much with us, it thankfully isn’t close to the way that it dominated out school and social lives over the past two school years.