Covid cases in India are rapidly increasing, reaching an average of 100k a week, easily surpassing the previous peak of 93k per week. No one knows why, though people being more relaxed with safety measures and more businesses opening up could have led to the rapid increase in cases.
That has led to the return to all online school at AES for two weeks. The current plan is to return to campus on April 26. The middle school faculty sent an email confirming that we will be fully online on April 12. The email didn’t give reasons as to why we are moving to virtual learning, though this wasn’t a huge surprise, as cases have started showing up within AES.
As such, a feeling of fear and anxiety is hovering over the middle school. People in school either felt safer or more scared with increased safety measures and temporary distanced learning. Another significant factor is family. Although most of us aren't in at-risk-groups, our family may be. I interviewed two students and about what they think.
Travis: I came because I could see my friends, and classes are easier in person. I don’t like online school. I think school was doing well in person, with social distancing…. it felt like normal school, and I think school was doing the best they could.
Sasha: Safety, I didn’t come to school because when school first opened cases were bad…. also because i had asthma, and i was doing fine in online school. I do believe it was really smart to do hybrid and different groups…. surface cleaning is important but more studies are showing that it’s spreading in the air. I think they did the best they can, but it just wasn’t enough, and it didn’t meet my family's expectations for safety.
Now ASA's have all been postponed, along with the middle school grade eight social. Along with this, high school IB exams have been cancelled, which has very mixed responses from students. Here are two high school students' opinions on it.
Mike: I think that it’s a good thing exams are cancelled, having them is kind of a safety risk. Whether it is COVID that can be a risk for the kids but also their families, or mental health risks. I know a lot of people who were really stressing out over the exams, and that’s not great. I get that some students were relying on them to bring grades up, but we could just have regular tests. Also in some classes we didn’t cover all of our course work, so we would not be prepared for the tests.
Aarya: They should have canceled exams, because that’s better for the majority of people, there are just a lot of risks associated with it. However this isn’t the best for me. Because there are no exams we are using predicted grades that we got last semester, which normally aren’t important, and those are going to be what colleges see. They replace the grades we got with exams, and we combine them with our IA scores are our final grades in the class. When we don’t have exams and we use these grades for our final grades, I feel less in control of my final grades.
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