The End of the Year - Andy Stefanick

In February, news about the coronavirus outbreak in China reached the US, and most people I know didn't even give it a second thought. I think lots of us kind of thought it would be like Ebola, where it was just a really big outbreak in one country. However, we were wrong. The virus spread to the US, and rumors were beginning to go around that we would have to cancel school. I remember the Thursday in mid-March when I heard that they were shutting down the school, and while at that point we pretty much all knew it was coming, it was definitely weird to think that we probably wouldn't be going back to school.

As we approach the final days of school, everything is starting to really wind down. It has been a long and interesting year, and a lot has happened. We started off the year just like normal, with regular classes and everything. No one could have expected what was to come.


Since school had to be closed, we started online distance learning, which definitely was a new thing for all of us. We began by just reviewing stuff we had already learned, seeing if we could just wait out the virus, but it soon became evident that we weren't going back to school any time soon. Once we started our online meetings and beginning to learn new things, distance learning became a little bit more like school, as opposed to the first week which was pretty much a joke. Distance learning is not nearly as beneficial as actually going to class, but I think that we were able to make it as good as we possibly could which was a good thing.

Really for me, the year has been winding down since the end of AP tests. Teachers haven't been assigning as much work, and in a lot of classes, we are just summarizing the year. There are no finals to worry about, so I feel like everyone is kind of just waiting until the end of the year now. I don't think the first day of summer will be as euphoric as usual since we all are stuck at home anyway, but it is still something to look forward to. It has definitely been an odd year, and certainly not how I imagined sophomore year would go, but at this point, I am just waiting for the point where we can stop the social distancing and try and go back to normal life.