Wow, How Long Did This Take?

2,275 days, 15,925 hours, 955,500 minutes, or 57,330,00 seconds. However small you break down the interval, the number is still large, still showing the dedication we had to pour into our schooling. However, for the Class of 2020 at Oak Hill High School our numbers got cut short.

Even without our cut down it did not really take that long to get here; most people think about their years in school as some of the longest years in their life, I however do not believe that to be true. Highschool is a schedule, a weekly schedule that keeps most on track. It makes the weeks go by fast, and the years go by even faster. 

13 years of schooling seems like it’s a lot, but it really isn’t. Considering how many years we will all soon spend living in the real world. It’s not much to worry about our years of schooling, because it might not even end up taking up a quarter of our life span; however, our years in school will give us some of the most important and impactful moments in our life, especially when a deadly virus brings us out of our routine and in-person meetings.

Routines take a big part of focus, and making sure everyone does what they need to when they need to; sadly, our class hasn’t had much fortune in sticking to routines, have we?

We faced our very own drought, and lived to tell the tale; deprived of our school routines of having a reason to dip on class and sit in the school bathrooms for 20-30 minutes, we had to tough it out in classes. No reasons to dip out and “fill up our water bottles” and take a “few” minute walk with our friends back to class, which always ended in walking the bowl. It was tough times for our class, and everyone else stuck in the drought with us. This drought brought us persistence, time at the middle school, and a ton of half days to teach us that water is quite important to keep a school running healthy.

But the drought was nothing compared to the pandemic of COVID-19, oh the dangerous virus that would lead to so much money spent on toilet paper and time spent inside. The quarantine, confirmed by many of my friends, was the worst part of it as we approached getting back into classes through distance learning. From which I’m sure a lot of us learned we’re not too good at. Learning to stay consistent in showing up to class meant setting a lot of alarms for me, and true dedication to actually show up to these classes I felt had no value left in them since I wouldn’t even be getting a number grade for my efforts.

Whether it was a P, F, or 0-100 I learned the classes would matter in the long run, but even better they became easier and, I’m sure everyone was happy with this, there were fewer Membean minutes required. Coronacation, as many would call it, left most students with an affinity to in-person classes, and a realization of how difficult not having hands-on learning would leave them. 

We, the Class of 2020 have had a learning experience unlike many others; we, the Class of 2020 learned from our hardships; we, the Class of 2020 graduated with our masks on.

Photo on Foter.com