The past few weeks have been chaos in many students’ experiences. Buildings, businesses, and public places all around Colorado are closed, taped off, or staffed at minimal capacity. The world has shifted so abruptly that at this point it’s unrecognizable to some. Adaptation is the hallmark of humanity, and the virus outbreak has further proven this point with remote learning.

Jeffco’s program of remote learning allows students to continue to attend school after building closures have quickly become the norm and the foreseeable future for national education. A way to limit the danger of germ-infested schools that act as highways for viruses and outbreaks, online school involves online lessons using Zoom as well as Google Classroom, Schoology, and other platforms to convey assignments. Students have begun acclimating to learning, completing assignments, and even in some cases, taking tests on their own in their homes. 

With the rest of the school year set to be entirely remote learning, and no end in sight for closures around the state, it’s beginning to resonate within students that this might be the future of their education. Many see some lingering effects from this pandemic: “I wonder if our generation will become germaphobic from this outbreak, since those who went through the great depression developed hoarding habits, both being forms of OCD,” Alex Richardson (11) said.

With a different perspective, Dawson Spencer, another junior at Dakota, is hopeful that people will learn from the chaos of COVID-19. “We as teenagers hear our parents talk about things like chickenpox or mumps or whatever illness they may have lived through as a child, and we hear them talk about how scary it may have been for anyone at the time,” Spencer said. “We also hear about the large amount of misinformation given out at the time, like how people thought it was a good idea to get chickenpox to build up immunity and then later found out it causes the shingles virus. The greatest lasting effect this will give us is the fact that people in our generation are going to start taking this kind of thing seriously, and maybe they will be a bit cleaner in the future.”

Since each student’s experience will differ during the pandemic, only time will tell how the COVID-19 outbreak will impact the current generation of high schoolers. As the world continues to scramble for a way to combat this virus, the only thing a student can do is find a way to get through the day happily, hopefully, and healthily.