Hello again! As promised, I’m back for more about how my year 2020 went. At the end of my last blog post, we were in the middle of my summer vacation.
This summer was probably one of the most boring 2 and a half months of my life. There was absolutely nothing to do because everything was shut down and no one could go out anywhere. However, one fun thing that happened during my break was going to my grandparents’ house for a few days. We could only stay there for 3 days because my dad had work going on at that time and he needed to teach some classes. Because my grandfather is 95 years old, we needed some way of getting him to our house. Normally, we would have taken him with us on a plane, but because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we couldn’t be sure that the other people on the plane were infected. We also couldn’t bring him in a regular car because that is a much too small space to be in. Thankfully, our friends who have an RV reached out and said they could use ours for our trip. This was a full-size RV, so it was very comfortable on the way there and back. it had 3 beds, and there was space for my grandfather to stand up once in a while. One downside of taking him in a car meant that we were going to have to take frequent stops rather than just stopping once or twice (which we did on the way there). Somehow, though, we managed to get home without having to sleep in the RV overnight. We had to make some accommodations for them before their arrival like rearranging their room for more space, but it was mostly simple. Nothing much happened after that during summer vacation, except when we were given the option to do either in-person or online school. But Covid foiled our plans again, and we were forced to go fully online again in August.
As school started, my peers and I immediately noticed the substantial increase in the workload from all of our classes. During the 2020 online spring semester, our governor ruled that we were not allowed to get graded on the letter scale anymore, and instead, we all moved to a pass-fail style of grading. This put much less stress on the students, and we all liked it better than getting A’s, B’s, etc. This change from no grading to more severe grading with more coursework than we would have had in person was a big shock to a lot of people around my grade level, in my school, and others. A lot of people were struggling to keep their motivation up because there was no way to physically turn in the work that we are assigned. By around the end of September, we all really wanted to go back to school but our administration had already announced that we weren’t going to go back to school by the end of the semester (now). the crazy part was that some private and Christian schools hadn’t even fully closed by then. Because the government has no hold over these schools, they were free to close whenever they wanted to. Things like these are reasons that the USA fell so far behind other countries in managing this virus.
We end this 2nd part of my official recap of 2020 at the beginning of October. Covid cases were spiking again with schools reopening, and it didn’t look like it was slowing down anytime soon. Little did we know, things were only going to get worse from there.
Thanks for reading part 2 of my recap of 2020! I hope you enjoyed reading this post, and I will be posting part 3 tomorrow, or in 2-3 days. There is also a post coming up soon about my first time skiing in a long time, so keep in touch. See you next time, and happy new year!