Distance Learning Is Taking an Emotional Toll on Students

Schooled is a series by Zach Schermele, a freshman at Columbia University, that explores the nuances of the American education system.
Sad girl sitting next to backpack
Feodora Chiosea

Sydney Goins cries when she goes on walks.

The college senior lost her dining hall job at the University of Georgia after classes were moved online in March because of the coronavirus outbreak. She delayed graduating and has already dropped one class. Facing an uncertain job market, she hopes to return to campus — and her dining hall gig — in the fall. Paying rent and caring for her nearly 90-year-old grandmother (who lives in assisted living) are all at the top of her mind right now — the last thing she worries about is school.

“I have no motivation,” Goins told Teen Vogue. “I don’t have in-person professors or classmates to motivate me, just myself, and I’m depressed. Discussion posts are piling up, and paper deadlines are closing in. I have nothing to say or think about. My brain is foggy.”

The coronavirus pandemic has forced schools at every level to grapple with a reality in which the fundamental assumptions upon which they normally operate — that the majority of students are in good health and have a relatively clear vision of the future ahead — no longer apply. With every state in the U.S. ordering or recommending school closures, learning has moved online, forcing students to bear the emotional brunt of a surreal new normal. Social isolation, the digital divide, and various tech difficulties with Zoom, the default video conferencing platform used by many schools, have all complicated the transition to distance learning. Well before the coronavirus outbreak, experts were labeling the mental health crisis on college campuses an “epidemic.” Now, COVID-19 is taking a never-before-seen toll on high school and college students.

“I’ve found that many of my students face obstacles working from home that they don’t normally experience at school — for example, they don’t always have a dedicated internet device from which to work, they don’t have a quiet space to work, and they have family and other obligations at home,” Bobson Wong, a math teacher at Bayside High School in New York City, told Teen Vogue.

Without teachers and friends around, Owen Midgette, a senior at Matthew Fontaine Maury High School in Virginia, says he’s less motivated to do schoolwork. The lack of a structured routine has jumbled his schedule. He feels like “every day is somehow a school-related day,” and there’s always an assignment looming in the back of his mind. When he’s not consumed with school, he worries about losing his friends.

“At school, I was constantly surrounded by my friends in classes or at lunch, but now the only way I can communicate with them is digitally,” he told Teen Vogue. “There are a few people I never had the chance to get contact information from, so now I have no way of checking up on them.”

Students and teachers fearing for each other’s well-being is another tenet of the coronavirus zeitgeist. About 15,000 high school students in Los Angeles aren’t even logging online for classes. Wong, the New York City math teacher, says some of his best students went completely AWOL after the city shut down public schools in mid-March. Dr. Thomas Lecaque, an assistant professor at Grand View University in Iowa — who has at least one student now doing the majority of his schoolwork from a smartphone — says around a third to half of his students are still in contact with him, and many of those he hasn’t heard from lack the technology to get in touch. Their emotions “run the gamut,” he says.

“Some of them are fine and bored,” he told Teen Vogue. “Many are stressed about changed classes in the midst of all of this; some are working new jobs with new hours; some are worried about family members.”

Lecaque described distance learning as “triage pedagogy” — an effort to “stem the educational bleed as best we can in order to survive the rest of the semester.” And despite the obstacles they’ve faced, students themselves have been vital to that effort. A group of tech-savvy students at New York City’s Harvest Collegiate High School, for example, offered lessons to older teachers in March on how to navigate online platforms like Zoom. Jania Witherspoon, a senior at Harvest, helped one teacher learn how to use the features important for running a classroom, like muting audio and breaking students into groups for discussion.

When a teacher at Harvest died in early April, most likely due to COVID-19, about 200 students, teachers and friends joined an online memorial service to celebrate his life. The call was “Zoombombed,” a term from the pandemic lexicon meaning that hackers hijacked the video conference, by a group of young boys who logged on flashing sexually explicit images and hurling racial slurs, among other obscenities. A teacher at the school told Teen Vogue he spent over 150 hours looking into the incident with the vice principal; the extensive investigation found no evidence that the Zoombomber was a Harvest student or alumnus. The New York City Department of Education has since banned the use of Zoom for remote learning purposes based on security and privacy concerns. Many other school districts around the country followed suit. The incident speaks to the shortcomings inherent to online platforms trying to recreate the human connections that only face-to-face interaction can provide.

Despite its failings, distance learning hasn’t adversely affected everyone. Some teachers and parents with ample internet access appreciate the increased communication with each other. Some students cherish the extra hours of sleep. Many have enjoyed the ability to structure their own schedules and work at their own pace. Sabrina Herrera, a sophomore at Harvest, said distance learning has made her a more accountable student. The way students feel about distance learning depends largely on how the pandemic has exacerbated their individual circumstances, says Martin Urbach, a music teacher at Harvest and the school’s restorative justice coordinator.

“Before we got onto this call, I spoke to Sabrina’s mom and she was like, ‘My child is thriving,’” he told Teen Vogue. “And yesterday, I was on the phone for 90 minutes with another student and his parents who have been having a really hard time.”

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Grading Is a Mess During the Coronavirus Pandemic

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