by Anika Lippke ‘24, News Editor

Image Courtesy of Adam Jeffery

Every generation has one distinct event that is defined as the most significant of their time. Many Millennials, for example, refer to 9/11 as their generation’s signature event, and for the Baby Boomers, that event was their namesake, the baby boom that occurred from 1946-1964. These events categorize groups of people by their age and draw them together through shared experience. Before 2020, there was no confirmation over what that event would have been that of Gen Z, but COVID-19 made the decision obvious. Although the pandemic affected everybody significantly, Gen Z was faced with a unique generational problem: that of attending school during, and after, a national lockdown. 

The nation’s educators and parents were overcome with panic while grappling with the reality that their students had lost months —perhaps even years —of legitimate schooling due to the pandemonium. Online schooling was deployed as an immediate solution to the quarantine throughout the country with little to no time for teachers to pre-emptively prepare adequately. While some schools, such as independent institutions, were given more support and flexibility in formulating their plans, other schools were left without alternatives to asynchronous online work for months before more cohesive plans could be formulated. Many students were left without engagement for months, putting them through an especially drastic version of the annual “summer slide”, where knowledge learned during the school year “slides” from an individual’s mind due to the long break one takes from intellectual stimulation over the summer holiday. Without the typical stimulation of regular schooling, much knowledge slipped through the cracks. 

According to a comparative study detailed in “The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning. What will it take to catch up?” by Megan Kuhfeld, Jim Soland, Karyn Lewis and Emily Morton, math and reading scores on standardized tests dropped by around 0.20 standard deviations.This is a number comparable to the effects caused on scores during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This number is more profound for public school students in lower-income areas, where COVID protocols were limited, and school was closed for much longer. 

On another hand, lack of rigorous engagement and purpose for such an extended period of time left students scrambling to find incentive. “I think COVID made me less motivated in specific subjects,” Aanya Kothari ‘24 admitted, “and that made my learning much less effective in my weaker classes.” The current students of the Newark Academy Upper School were between the ages of eleven to fifteen during quarantine, which are widely considered some of the most important years in an adolescent’s life for emotional and intellectual development. At Newark Academy and other schools, this combination of factors is visible in the day-to-day lives of students, especially in the areas of time and stress management, emotional regulation and social exposure. 

 Despite this strong dichotomy between our pre- and post-COVID selves, however, the year 2023 has already started. Although the pandemic still hasn’t gone away for good, the burning question has been pestering many for a while now: How can we get back into our normal, pre-COVID daily lives? The easy answer is to slowly ease back into things. 

With many resources being made available, such as the Mental Health Initiative at school and the understanding that the world shared similar experiences over the pandemic, there are many methods of outreach available for those suffering from consequences of the pandemic. When it comes to re-learning what it means to learn at school, it is important to acknowledge that there are many who can sympathize with and support each other as the world gets back onto its feet.