Student 1:
I remember doing my work like a normal human being, then we get this announcement by the Principle saying COVID has broken out everywhere. And I just remember running home like,”Mom I have no school.”

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton. And this week we’re doing something special. This year, our team has been working with three seventh grade teachers from Cedarbrook Middle School in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania.

Alec Patton:
All year, they have been talking to students about what the year has been like for them, and they have each turned these interviews into podcast episodes. These episodes are honest, they’re raw, and they capture the scary uncertain year better than anything else we could have come up with. So, now the school year is coming to an end, we’re releasing these three episodes over the next three days. Our first episode is by seventh grade English teacher, Kristyn Sanborn. I asked her if there’s anything listeners should pay particular attention to on our episode.

Kristyn Sanborn:
I would say the thing that I was taken aback by the most, in this process is just the wisdom and the maturity with which students looked at the pandemic, the perspective that they gained, and I felt like I was talking to adults in some way. These are just kids, but they were talking like they had already lived this entire lifetime because this past year I think has been so serious for so many of them in different ways, that just the perspective and the maturity with which they were speaking in all of this was just, you know I get it, but it was really wow to experience that.

Alec Patton:
All right, let’s roll it.

Student 2:
We all should just pat ourselves on the back because we really made it through the year.

Kristyn Sanborn:
For the students of Cheltenham, the end of normal arrived on Monday, March 9th, 2020. The end of normal started out just as that, a normal day.

Student 3:
The last day in a school building, we had a group thing for 7C. We were all in the gym and we were just playing dodge ball. I remember that day, I wore a dress because it just was a nice day.

Student 4:
I remember walking out with Gino because he and I were sort of a thing, but we’re not going to talk about that. And we were playfully pushing each other around like seventh graders.

Kristyn Sanborn:
At first, the end of normal wasn’t taken seriously by many of us.

Student 5:
I wasn’t in school for the last day. So the last day for me was that Friday, the sixth, I remember it was probably allergies and I had this really bad cough. And I remember that day that my friends who were like, I hope you don’t have COVID and they were joking about it because I’ve got time. I think it wasn’t as serious.

Kristyn Sanborn:
The end of normal was sudden.

Student 1:
I remember doing my work, like a normal human being. Then we get this announcement by events. People saying COVID has broken out everywhere. And I just remember running home like, ” Mom, I have no school.”

Kristyn Sanborn:
The end of normal seemed like it would be exciting.

Student 6:
I don’t actually remember much of the actual day, but I do remember very distinctly going home. My mom had just decided to come with my dad when they picked me up and I was in the car with my friend and my mom was on her phone and she looked and she saw that there was a new email, and it said that we had gotten a week off because they needed to clean the school building. And me and my friend were like, “Yay. A week off.”

Kristyn Sanborn:
The end of normal didn’t come with any goodbye.

Student 7:
We were packing up getting ready to go. And one of the students were like, oh, the teacher has a secret. She announced that we were going to be off for the week. And then I never got to see her in person again.

Kristyn Sanborn:
The end of normal became long and drawn out. It took us a while to realize that life as we knew it has gone.

Student 4:
We were on STR and we were all just excited how we didn’t have school and how we didn’t have any assignments to turn in, and then I think a week went by and that’s when news reports started the role in.

Student 8:
I was in a group chat with the high school students, and then they were talking about it and I was like, “Two weeks. Oh, okay.” And then it just gradually got a longer amount of time and I was disappointed. I actually liked school in seventh grade so.

Kristyn Sanborn:
The end of normal would become the new normal and we would experience several iterations of the new normal, bringing us to the kind of back to normal that we are now just starting to know. Back in school with some of us lucky enough to be back together and the other half still holding on through a computer screen.

Kristyn Sanborn:
We were looking to understand, to process, what we had all been through, a shared pandemic, the same storm yet we’re all in different boats. I set sail to gain insight from a masked up, socially distant circle of both former and current students, their realness, their rawness, their remarkable wisdom would make it seem as if they had each lived a lifetime within just one year.

Kristyn Sanborn:
So you have made it through a full year of pandemic learning. And there are just 25 days left in this school year.

Kristyn Sanborn:
[crosstalk 00:05:40] So how are you feeling about that?

Student 9:
This year for me, it was personally for me, it was scary because I thought we were going to be in school and it’s virtual and now we’re in person and who knows what we’re going to do next year. So it’s going to be a surprise.

Student 3:
I didn’t know was only 25 days left. I really have to pull up my grades, but yeah, we’ve been managing this year it’s been okay for me. I don’t know how it was for other people because you don’t know how other things are at other people’s homes. I appreciate the teachers for sticking with us and not getting too frustrated if work couldn’t get turned down because a lot of things were going on, it was so complicated during that time.

Student 2:
I feel like at the beginning of the year it was rough and I felt like we all need to remember how rough it was taking off from seventh grade virtual and trying to learn new subjects, and it’s shifting to eighth grade virtual also. And so I feel like we all should just pat ourselves on the back because we really made it through the year. Most teachers were very understanding. As students we just had to remember that everybody’s going through something, and we just had to push ourselves more than before.

Student 3:
I’m a little sad that the year is over because I feel like this year we’ll definitely be known as like the year that I want to say the forgotten near because everybody didn’t get to finish their year and didn’t get to do the stuff that they wanted to do. But it is good that we all have the opportunity to at least come in and finish our year here.

Student 4:
You know, when we first thought that we were going to get out of the school it was only about to be two weeks, by two months it was like [inaudible 00:07:26] really depressing because we started to realize that school was really kind of our safe place other than at home.

Student 6:
For me personally it was interesting to see how everyone adapted to everything and how quickly it kind of, it took like a couple of months, but then everything started piecing together and everyone started shifting focus from “Ah this is a bad situation.” To “Okay, how do we deal with it?” What are your thoughts on that? I’m curious as a teachers perspective.

Kristyn Sanborn:
What are my thoughts? All right you’re flipping the script. [crosstalk 00:07:59].

Kristyn Sanborn:
All right, you got it. So at 25 days left, this has been our sweets. This has been the most difficult year of teaching for me, the heartbreak of losing you. I still refer to your class as the class that corona stole. So you’ll have a place in my heart that will always be that piece that is never truly finished. I have reinvented myself 15 times because I’m really passionate about teaching.

Kristyn Sanborn:
Every time there was another change I had to be good at it, I had to be the best, so I had to reinvent myself and starting in the beginning, chasing everybody down and calling kids on their cell phones every day. Like, “Why aren’t you reading chapter five of the outsider, where are you on notation.” From that to teaching summer school, just so I could learn how to be a virtual teacher to teaching virtually and figuring out breakout rooms, now we’re in the hybrid and figuring out how to teach a Socratic dialogue with hybrid, which I think we finally did right my seventh graders.

Kristyn Sanborn:
But the bittersweet part of that is super sentimental. I lost you guys and now I feel like I finally got to know this class and I’m going to lose them too. I need a break. I need to chill out, but I don’t want to say goodbye.

Student 2:
I feel like we all feel this way because we never got our official goodbye. The goodbye that we expected we were going to get, I feel like coming from EP we all felt like, this is going to be the year of change, this is going to be the year I make a name for myself, it’s going to be our turn everything around. And then I eventually it gets sent off the high school but that year, in a sense, was stolen from us and I feel like we kind of feel a little helpless because we can’t do nothing to get it back.

Student 2:
All those memories that we created with each other and couldn’t finish are just taken, and then we just ended up at home, not knowing how your friends were. It just was all very fast. And we had to adapt to this new lifestyle.

Student 5:
I totally agree, because I feel like as a sixth grader and at the beginning of the year, I can’t wait to get to Cedar because you’re so [inaudible 00:10:09] to go to a new school because you’re going to be all grown up now because you’re in middle school and then this happens and then you have to learn to adapt to being virtual for sixth grade and then coming back to a new school for virtual and then coming in, it’s just kind of messing with your head a little. So it’s definitely really hard.

Kristyn Sanborn:
I really appreciate your willingness to be so open and real about your feelings. In the face of adversity there are often important life lessons to be gained, so is there anything that you have gained from this time, things that you will keep or take with you?

Student 4:
I gained like my strength of being really shy because I was, back then, I was so shy and we’ve been traveling a lot during quarantine going to different places, talking to people. And I feel like now in person in school, I can talk to people and I’m less shy.

Student 10:
I need a temper, but besides it I’m, it’s like it balances out because I also got a lot more patient with people in some certain circumstances because teachers, they might not be able to get to something as quickly as you need them to. So I have to relax with it. But temper, as in others students, say they’re interrupting the class over learning something important while we were virtual, it got on my nerves.

Student 2:
Learning how to adapt to situations that I would normally not face like learning how to adapt with my education, learning how to adapt when just speaking up for what I need now, because knowing that what I need may not always be there.

Student 6:
I think the main thing that everybody here at least in some sense gained was a lot of time. I think a lot of people gained experience and insight and time to kind of just reflect on things as a whole, because that was really the only thing we had. I’ve tried, you know, to learn and develop skills and things like that. But I think that was the main thing, the experience of having an over abundance of time and what to do with that.

Student 4:
I think what I have gained was probably to not take so many things for granted and because most of us were like, “Oh, I hate school.” “I don’t want to go to school anymore.” Now that we actually didn’t go to school for a couple of months, everyone was like, “Oh, I want to go back to in person.” Like most people are .

Student 2:
Before COVID. I used to just think that school was taken for granted. Going to the store, I took it for granted, just going outside, I took it for granted, but being in quarantine it really shows you nothing is certain, nothing is imprint because I know that I could lose a family member as quick as a dime would drop. I could lose my life from just hugging a friend that I haven’t seen in a long time and forgetting I’m in a pandemic. I can lose my life from going to school and getting too close to somebody in a hallway by accident.

Student 6:
I just wanted to piggyback off of what you said about taking things for granted, because typically the thing you want a lot and then get it and you don’t want it anymore. And that was a big thing that I noticed, not having something predefined to occupy yourself with and being a kid and not having that much to do it kind of started getting to people, I think, opinions on going to school and having things to do and having structure and your schedule really changed and further [inaudible 00:13:47] to be appreciated.

Kristyn Sanborn:
So what do you think next year will look like?

Student 3:
I can’t really say what it will be, but I just hope that it’s going to be a lot sort of how our seventh grade was before the quarantine. Maybe all of our classes the same day so they’re not getting left behind. So we’re ready for the year after.

Student 1:
I think next year we need to remember that teachers are trying their best. We just came from a struggle.

Student 4:
But I feel like teachers and students will kind of get it a little bit more and I think it will be way easier next year. And I’m hoping that people will appreciate what we have, what this year was and what next year could be.

Kristyn Sanborn:
A great big thank you goes out to my eighth graders, Lonnie, Chloe, and Finn and seventh graders, Shaya, Morele and Ella.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed was hosted by me Alec Patton. This episode was written and edited by Kristin Sanborn. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. We have a new issue of our print journal, Unboxed, that just came out. You can check that out along with lots more at hightechhighunboxed.org, all one word. Thanks for listening.