In January 2020, I remember my roommate rambling on about this new virus that was discovered in China -- “coronavirus”. I was really busy with a coding project, and just brushed it off. I don’t read the news usually, and Canada is an ocean away.
And then it gets more serious in China. She tells me that her friends in China are all doing school online; my uncle, aunt and other relatives in China are all under lockdown, meaning they stop going to work or have rotations, and don’t go out unless it’s for grocery shopping or emergency needs.
The number of cases in China rises to 70,000, and South Korea and Italy become virus hotspots. All of a sudden, things start to look bad. Washington gets an outbreak in nursing homes, and there are scattered cases here and there in Vancouver. But the BC ministry of health says that the risk is low for us.
The situation in the States gets worse. Donald Trump, who initially denied that coronavirus is a real threat, and thus delayed all the coronavirus testing, is a failure in dealing with the virus. Most state universities in the United States move their classes online.
At this point, I was pretty happy. That meant UBC might go online too. I remember in the second week of March, I only went to 1 lab and 1 tutorial the entire week, because all my classes were non-essential and the virus justified me skipping class. One of my lab group members was apprehensive about UBC moving online. I was so surprised -- I thought everybody would welcome university shutting down. It was one of his last terms studying civil engineering, and he had a lab course that wasn’t possible to complete online. He says there are no good resolutions, since doing it in the summer would require a lot of coordination since people would be on coop or not in Vancouver, and not doing the labs might affect him doing a good job as a civil engineer where safety is a priority. Can’t relate.
I pack my suitcase and head home. UBC announces a shutdown on Saturday, with classes moving online for the rest of the term.
Yet as time goes by, the initial excitement and fright has been replaced by a feeling of disorientation -- arising from the displacement of normalcy in our lives. I don’t even know how many days have passed since I’ve gone home… it feels like I’ve gone through a time warp, and was stuck living endless Saturdays over and over. And I’ve slowly gotten used to the scary numbers and the daily bombardment of COVID-19 news.
It’s also scary to think how much of our lives are affected. The economy is plunging, and my summer coop job that I’ve worked so hard to get is hanging by a thread. And who knows how long this will go on for? Global recessions and depressions have been predicted. I’m certainly not old enough to have seen disasters like this -- the 2008 recession happened when I was still young, and 9/11 as well. I remember learning about stock market crashes in business education 10, Black monday 1929, 1987, but never expecting it to happen in real life. This was a textbook thing right? And then I live through Black Monday 2020, which gets recorded in Wikipedia right after the ordeal.
The serenity as a citizen in the midst of chaos is often underlooked. For example, when learning or watching movies about past wars, we’re always talking about battle scenes, leaders making important decisions, or war-time hospitals treating wounded soldiers. But we’re never really told about what life was like for the ordinary people. People that were not on the front lines. Likely, life just went on as normal, or close to normal for these people. And it’s about the same now. When this pandemic is written in the history books, it will be about the bloodcurdling hospitals and imcompetent government, not the ordinary citizens at home working, studying, playing games, and writing blogs.
Opinion on Online Classes
So all of our classes got moved online, either in live streams or recorded videos. Initially, I was really happy, because I often skipped lectures which usually have participation marks. But even then I would still go to some classes, and catch up on other lectures/do homework in my breaks.
Yet that’s no longer the case. Without physical classes, I listen to 5 minutes of a lecture recording, get bored, and quit the window. The live stream lectures are recorded anyways, fueling my procrastination. Furthermore, some profs have postponed deadlines for our assignments, so I never start until the last minute. Being 2 weeks behind in lectures now, I say I’m bored out of my mind, yet never actually study.
I think that’s one of the biggest pitfalls of online classes. University is already de-motivating enough. Big classes, and professors never care if you skip or do homework. But at least there’s regularly scheduled physical lectures that you’ll miss out on if you don’t go. But now, since the lectures are accessible at any time, we keep telling ourselves that we’ll catch up later in a never ending cycle of delaying what we must do anyways.
So that’s my conclusion. Can't believe I actually miss school...
