Starting high school is supposed to be a rite of passage: a step closer to adulthood, a time to mature, and an opportunity to meet new people. It is a memorable scene in so many of those slightly clich\u00e9 teen movies ingrained in our memories. So, starting high school virtually in 2020 was not what any freshman expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was the inherent irony that for the first month of school, pajama day was every day. Instead of waiting for the bus to take us to school, we got an extra hour of sleep. The process of meeting our teachers and classmates was limited to turning our mics on to say hi in class or simply giving a thumbs up to the little boxes on our screens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those choosing to do hybrid learning transitioned in-person these past two weeks and felt like they were having a second first week of school. Although it was late-October, \u201chow was your summer?\u201d was a phrase constantly repeated on campus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is the new normal,\u201d said Natalie Delson (III), \u201cI know we are missing out on something, but I don\u2019t know what yet. It\u2019s hard not being able to meet all the new people.\u201d Delson is a new freshman this year, which brings on its own set of difficulties: \u201cWhat is tending to happen now is that all the new kids are starting to clump together, instead of making friends with the people who have already been at Fieldston for a while. This starts to defeat the whole purpose of having new kids,\u201d said Delson. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Echoing this sentiment, Talia Kohn (III) added \u201cIt\u2019s disappointing knowing that we can\u2019t have a normal freshman year. We will not have the same high school experience that the sophomores, juniors, and seniors\u2026 It\u2019s hard to feel motivated online [when] all you want to do is go back to bed and sleep.\u201d This struggle to develop \u201cnormal\u201d habits and routines due to remote learning, coupled with the fact that many freshmen do not fully know their teachers, each other and the resources the school provides, makes for an extremely difficult transition to high school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a new student myself, the first couple of weeks of starting a new school virtually were very hard and stressful. However, as I transitioned into on-campus learning this week, I realized that Fieldston is very welcoming, and every day I feel less like a new student and more like a member of the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Starting high school is supposed to be a rite of passage: a step closer to adulthood, a time to mature, and an opportunity to meet new people. It is a memorable scene in so many of those slightly clich\u00e9 teen movies ingrained in our memories. So, starting high school virtually in 2020 was not what any freshman expected. There was the inherent irony that for the first month of school, pajama day was every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":278,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[347,318,321],"tags":[],"coauthors":[398],"class_list":["post-5046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-news","category-opinion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/278"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5047,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5046\/revisions\/5047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5046"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}