A House Divided

Brendan McGann

Springfield College

Brendan McGann

English

Text

I am a current student at Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts. Not being able to return to finish the second half of the Spring semester has been a rough time. Not only am I confined to my house to continue my education, my family is also. My mother is a first-grade teacher and hasn't been able to return to her job either. My step-father has been working every other day at a local college here, Vassar College, but I don't know how long that'll be, since he will be furloughed soon. The tensions between all of us have been high at some points, whether it's doing family projects at home like building our almost completed patio, not communicating well, or just seeing each other after a long day of each of our own work. It feels like my house is divided at certain points, not being able to agree on many different topics and all of us having low patience, itching to leave and get out of the house. My personal experience of online learning and finishing the semester has been horrible. I haven't been able to learn much from sitting behind a computer and trying to watch my professors as they struggle with technology all throughout the semester and even through finals. I also experienced this period where my professors completely changed their habits of emailing us for every class. One professor that stopped emailing every class thought I dropped the class since I was endlessly waiting for an email that never came. Other professors even changed how many times they were going to teach in a week. At the beginning of online learning, I enjoyed that I didn't have to wake up every day for class since they weren't going to be teaching, but it hurt my whole learning experience. Now that all of my finals are done and over with, I am completely happy to not have to sit in front of this computer every day. With that being said, I feel sorry for my parents for them still having to work through a computer, teaching, or not being able to work at all. This pandemic has been impacting everyone in every possible way and I feel like I'm lucky to even have a home and a computer to continue an education. I'll finish this story with a quote from my grandfather in lightheartedness: "If you realize it, 'pandemic' is 'dem' surrounded by 'panic.' Seems pretty accurate."