Why is everything still closed down?

I mean I get it, but no. I don't.

for the past two years, schools have remained closed, and it doesn't look like they're considering opening except for final exams. looking at how much of a trainwreck online school has been in the past two years, i don't expect people my age to do terribly well when we get to our first year of college.

why is that?

well, it's simple: most people haven't actually learnt anything related to the school's curriculum, even if they took subjects they loved before going into 2020. since I can only concretely give examples about people i know, lemme paint a picture for y'all.

I have quite the diverse friend group; one is trying to pursue biochemical research, one is trying to get into law, one is trying to be a musician, one wants to go to japan and work in the auto industry, one is trying to live upto her mother's expectatons, and then there's me who wanted to teach science (and maybe get into research too).

here's how all of them are doing:

• the biochemical research one is now unable to focus on biology anymore and is now learning to play the violin while watching a little too much anime.
• the one trying to be a lawyer is now thinking of dropping law and going into politics instead.
• the musician realised it's gonna require too much money and doesn't know what to do anymore.
• the guy who wants to go to japan is mostly doing fine since he got a conditional offer from kyoto university, but he's saying he can't guarantee passing out of high school with good enough grades for them to not reject him after the fact.
• the one trying to live up to her mother's expectations isn't doing too well, since she's not the academic kind while her parents are both professors.
• as for me, i went from reading 4-5 hours a day about physics to approximately 0 hours since it's been more and more of an uphill battle where you just keep solving questions for no reason other than "you have to get better at tests" instead of learning about why stuff works the way it does, and any questions are shot down if acknowledged at all; which doesn't go well with a public speaking anxiety which seems to be worse during online school than in physical school.

that's not good, is it?

it's not.

i know it's just my friend group and a lot of factors could cause this to happen only to us but not to others, but these people are the most hardworking people i've met in my life, and it's a strike rate of 100%, no exceptions.

and it's not like we're the only ones going through this.

just look on the internet.

a lot of kids are complaining about not having the motivation to do anything anymore (there's always some lazy people in there who don't want to work, but they have a consistent population; the sudden spike in complaints about a lack of motivation has to be from people genuinely struggling).

not just that, a lot of teachers are also having kids show up in college with basically no knowlege of what was taught in school because they didn't pay attention to online school. I predict this problem is going to get a LOT worse in the next few months as people my age get into college; and if the pandemic doesn't end soon, the next year of freshers will be even more problematic.

i realise that younger kids have gotten a much worse problem to deal with, but there still is time to save them from our fate.

for us however, it's over.*

oh dear asterisk, why have you have come to trouble me again.

wait no

an asterisk in this case is good news, because that means all is not lost.

for example, i got into computers! i made my blogs, did some stuff and now i'm good enough to have the slightest clue of what i'm doing!

as for my friends, they're also slowly finding stuff they're genuinely interested in.

so i'm not completely pessimistic for this generation of kids. yet.

i still feel like we need to do a lot of work to make sure kids don't get the short end of the stick, but if we somehow prevent the worst possible case, we will have a lot more people going into fields they genuinely like than the previous generations.

anyway, i guess that's enough for this post.

this post was supposed to go up in january last week, but oh well (it's february 1 today, and i finally pushed this post to completion.)

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