The Covid-19 pandemic was a difficult time for the world. People were sick and dying, there were so many who weren’t able to pay for the most basic necessities because they were quarantined from their job and couldn’t get hours, and students across the world felt the impact when spring break morphed into summer break and they still weren’t able to go out, to have fun, to learn and see their friends. The relief and pure joy I felt when the schools opened back up was immeasurable. Finally, I could learn, could talk to people that weren’t the baby sister or little brother I had to babysit while my parents were working. The pandemic erased the end of my 5th grade year, and even when I went into the 6th grade, I still wore the mask I once associated with doctors on TV. Middle school was so different from elementary, what with the plexi-glass dividers on our desks and the mask that every student and staff member had to wear, and how nobody was allowed to sit next to anybody else at lunch. Immediately, I saw the difference between the fabric tucked over their faces and the big smiles I used to see on the first day of school. I didn’t grow up using computers, and even in elementary, we only used them to play CoolMathGames or to take our tests. It seemed that everyone but me knew what Focus Portal was, how to upload documents, how to convert a Word Doc into a PDF. I was shy, and embarrassed that I didn’t understand something that was so normal for everybody else. I completed the first quarter of 6th grade with mostly Fs in the gradebook, and it would have stayed that way if my science teacher hadn’t come up to me, baffled by the fact that one of her star students, someone who always passed the tests and looked like she was working, had a big fat zero in her class. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I didn’t know how to actually upload the work, but even with the mask covering half her face, I could tell she understood my work wasn’t magically disappearing from Focus. She told me to ask questions, demonstrated how to use Focus to the class, called on me when my hand wasn’t raised; she forced me out of a shell I didn’t even realize I was trapped in.
The change wasn’t immediate. I was still shy, still worried about how I’d look asking questions that I should know the answers to, but now I knew how to upload my work. I made friends, I began to gain confidence in myself when I knew that nobody was going to care if I asked how to access Teams from Google Chrome. They’d help me.
I will always be grateful to my science teacher, who spent the better part of what was a chaotic year showing me how to be a student. I raised my hand, I asked and answered questions, and my grades began to rise. Now, when I find myself in a new classroom with those familiar tiles on the floor, scared to ask a question, I think of how many other students must be feeling the same way in that classroom; so I ask the question and risk looking ridiculous, because maybe someone else just needed to see that there are no stupid questions, that it’s our job as students to ask our teachers anything. I’ll always be grateful to that teacher, who motivated me to just be a student and stop pretending to be a professional.