Neko



What was the biggest challenge you faced during quarantine?

"What was the biggest challenge you faced during quarantine?" was a prompt on a school assignment in high school. Similar to the "How has the coronavirus quarantine hurt or helped you?" question, it features a commentary about how during Covid-19 there was many accomadations made for people to be able to carry on with their lives, while disabled people who could have used the same accomadations all along were denied them before now.



There were a few big challenges that I experienced during "quarantine."

One of them was that I had already been learning from home prior... which made this home-isolation and home-learning stressful and frustrating in a totally different way.

I had been working from home already, for a while before everyone else did too, so I was already getting cabin fever (and have been at my limit several times already) before most people complained they felt this way. The added home-isolation, closing of stores, and etc, absolutely did not help my pre-existing cabin fever and restlessness.

Additionally, there was something else extremely frustrating about "quarantine," and by extension, schooling from home, and that was the fact that I had been denied certain accommodations when it would've been helpful to me working from home.

One specific example, upon others I could remark upon, that I quite honestly continue to remain bitter about, is that I had frankly complained to the gym teacher/s that I should not be writing essays in place of exercise, and even explained that it was not gym if I wasn't doing gym. That an essay should not be equivalent to exercising. That an essay was not equivalent to exercising.

I had been told, in return, that basically, there would be no way for me to do exercises from home and to prove that I was doing it.

In the exact words, I was told "I understand this is not what you want to do, but we need something from you in order to give you credit."

And also, "If there was a way to have you do a Google Hangout and do various exercises for class trust me we would rather that as well."

You can imagine how I felt when the "distance learning" started and it was deemed acceptable for everyone to simply fill out a couple sentences about each exercise they were doing for gym each day.

And also how I feel now that everyone is simply expected to join a Google meet, one of which is almost always camera's off and muted, and sometimes fill out a couple sentences or take a screenshot of an app proving they went outside and walked.

...The point of me remarking upon this isn't to call out any certain staff or class, not at all. The point is, rather, to call out the flaws in the system, the double standard, the general ignorance, and the extraordinarily terrible fact that when I could have used such accommodations that I was basically told "no, it's not possible" but now that everyone else is now also working from home it is suddenly possible.

This is only one example. As anyone could probably imagine, this school, and that class, is not the only one with these aggravating views and actions.

written by Ari Painful Writer