What It Was Like To Be a Student in Australia During the Pandemic and Why It Matters
As someone who had to travel about an hour to school each day (sometimes longer if there was a disruption to public transport) I certainly welcomed my new school setting. This attitude didn’t really shift in the second Victorian lockdown either, although I would rather have completed all of the tests which contributed to my ATAR (the score used to apply for universities) at school.
At first, I would wake up an hour or more before my classes, but as the lockdown progressed I became lazier and sometimes got out of bed 10 minutes before my first online class. I don’t believe I was the only person who adopted these behaviours either. Many of my classmates turned up 5 and sometimes 10 minutes into a class.
Sometimes it was difficult to concentrate and I was much more interested in the traffic passing past my window than the ethics of gene cloning or the structure of proteins. Thankfully, I was not unmuted by the teacher during these lapses.
I am also quite the introvert, which in conjunction with my social anxiety meant that I did not feel the impact of social distancing on my social life as strongly as others. For example, I wasn’t nearly as disappointed as many of my peers when school social events were inevitably cancelled. That being said I did try to converse with friends over Snapchat and Discord semi-regularly and despite this, felt lonely sometimes. It’s important to remember that everyone's experiences are different and so other introverts or people with social anxiety could have felt differently.
If like me, your teachers regularly tried to motivate you through your last year of secondary education, you probably heard something along the lines of “think of all the stories you can tell your kids about”. One month and ten days into 2021, this is something I still think about. Not because the idea of dispensing a child from my body is terrifying to me, or rather not only because the idea of dispensing a child from my body is terrifying to me, but because I wonder whether my children would experience something worse. Would they view 2020 as we view some of the years before it?
What could possibly be worse?
As I am sure many of you are aware, this pandemic was not a ‘black swan’ event; scientists predicted this years before. Now they are predicting that we should expect something worse. Professor Tom Koch thinks that the world could face another pandemic in the next 5 to 8 years.
As to the cause, well there could be multiple. Many researchers believe that the next pathogen to cause such chaos will likely be from a “zoonotic transfer” (When a pathogen spreads from other animals to humans); the same process that they believe happened with COVID-19. When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. As a consequence of urbanisation and the deforestation that preceded it, we are much closer to animal habitats than ever before. The sale of exotic or rare animals at wet markets throughout Asia are likely not going to change either. Furthermore, just because we have adopted higher hygiene standards this year does not mean we will continue to uphold those standards many years into the future. When you couple all of these factors together, it is easy to see how history could repeat itself once more.
Bacteria could cause another pandemic too. Bacteria resistant to common types of antibiotics, or ‘superbugs’ are on the rise. What’s particularly scary about these pathogens are that many of the drugs we have right now do nothing to combat them. Globally, superbugs are said to kill 700,000 people per year.
Why it matters
Students across Australia have been struggling with online learning. Data from 2019 suggests that although about 87% of Australians can access the internet at home, 32% of children (aged 5–14) living in disadvantaged areas are unable to access the internet. As a consequence, parents and guardians fear that the literacy and numeracy skills of their children will be severely worse than that of their peers.
Even if these students had access to the internet, at times it may not be fast enough to reliably load videos or manage video conferencing apps. I occasionally experienced this problem but my teachers managed to support me and other students like me. Some schools just may not have adequate resources to help students on a case by case basis.
If you were a student in their final year of schooling it would have felt a whole lot worse. Even if there are many pathways into the course or future job you desire, many students want to pursue an undergraduate pathway. As a consequence, there is a lot of pressure in year 12 to achieve the ATAR ranking required to meet prerequisites. I, like many others, spent much of the year worrying about assessment scores and what was or was no longer in the syllabus. If I had to worry about whether I had access to the internet on a given day, on top of that, I am not sure I would have been able to graduate.
It is also worth noting that due to bushfires that ravaged the country in early January, some students would have had to deal with more vexing problems besides an erratic internet connection.
Whilst the administrators of exams promised to provide special consideration to the graduates of this year, we are unable to tell how effective it was at supporting students or judging their individual constraints. In any case, I think there is enough evidence to suggest that more should be done to provide technology and resources to students in need before they unquestionably need it.
We certainly have a lot to learn from this pandemic. Why we should treasure the time we spend talking face-to-face with others, why we should value the sensation of fresh air hitting our faces, or why we should appreciate our access to large packs of toilet paper; just to name a few. However, just take care not to celebrate too much now that there’s a vaccine rollout and we’re on our path to “normalcy”. The only constant in life is change. We’ve got some preparing to do.
