The Lost Years: COVID-19 and High School Students

In March of 2020, Needham High students were told they would receive a two-week hiatus from demanding assignments and difficult exams due to concerns regarding COVID-19. The hiatus turned into a year and a half of nontraditional learning, leaving the nation with a set of peculiar students. With the gap in the only mode of learning -- being in-person five days a week -- students knew, one could argue that we have a school consisting solely of underclassmen; the current seniors left traditional school in their sophomore year, stunting their maturity as students. This same effect applies to all other grades.

To break down this strange occurrence, let’s look back at those scary, unpredictable weeks in the early spring of 2020.

As the air grew warm with March winds, the class of 2022, being just sophomores at the time, could be seen marching through the brown, slushy snow and into NHS. Having only experienced a year and a half of high school, the (then) sophomores were still relatively new to the whole “rotating schedule” and “study” thing. But what’s even worse than our sophomores now somehow being seniors, is the fact that just recently, the class of 2023 were lost in the hallways, asking for help to “locate their advisories.” Now, we have subjected these poor younglings to the burden of APUSH, AP Lang, and some AP Calc, while they should be focusing their energy on their unfinished math 9 courses and introductory art classes. If the strange circumstances of our current seniors and juniors shocks you, wait until you hear about NHS’s actual underclassmen. When we left school back in 2020, the class of 2024 were just 8th graders -- teenage students stuck in their awkward middle school phases and riding the all time high of being the oldest at Pollard. Similarly, the class of 2025 were just 12- and 13-year-olds being fed Pony Boy propaganda and learning to identify varying types of rocks.

The period in time widely dubbed as “quarantine” effectively brought our social and academic lives to a standstill. Just yesterday our seniors were navigating the process of what clubs to join and how to ace that geometry test, while our first years were just iddy-biddy students only three years out of elementary school. I think it's fair to say that we are all fairly unfamiliar with the “normal” school lifestyle and perhaps could even call ourselves a school filled with underclassmen. Not to make excuses… but… maybe it’s justified that not a single one of us can locate the grade level office.

So to our dear first years, be kind to yourself as you adjust to a high school when you barely got to experience middle school. We, the “upperclassmen” (who are still mentally underclassmen) are right there with you in navigating the confusing high school.