July 2019 BQ–that is Before Quarantine–the average student’s daily life involved waking up, getting ready, going to school, doing some homework in the library, going to a part-time job, and going home. That was normal.
March 2020 saw a drastic change to which no one knew how to react. People were suddenly left jobless, students who worked part-time suddenly couldn’t leave the house without being harassed by the quarantine task force, and lives were lost in the blink of an eye. Things changed from the daily norm we had grown accustomed to, and now we were forced to accept this strange new world.
My mother is a working mom and a leader in our church. This means she needs to attend meetings via Zoom or Facebook Messenger or any other communication app. On top of all of this, she is taking a Master’s degree, which requires the use of Zoom. My youngest sister, a junior high school student, attends classes daily in her bedroom using our father’s laptop, while my other sister sits in the living room waiting for the website where she needs to view her class coursework to load. All the while, my father, who occasionally attends court hearings via Zoom, sits in his bedroom hoping to connect to the courtroom, so he may not lose his case by dismissal. Is this the “new normal” being advertised to us? Definitely not, but it’s the one we have no choice but to accept.
The price of a laptop, an internet connection—have these become the cost of education? Has the new normal made it pricier to learn?
It is easy to forget that we live in a Third World country. Internet connectivity is not as fast here as it is elsewhere. If a middle-class family is struggling to keep up with education because three siblings have to attend classes all at the same time, all with their own bit of technology and forced to share a meager internet connection, how much more will a lower-class family, already struggling to pay for food and water, afford the internet, gadgets, or even textbooks required? And how much help is it for the school or university to release statements such as “if you do not have your own internet connection, go to the nearest internet cafe and log in for class”?
A simple search on the internet will lead to horror story after horror story, from students trying their hardest to submit a one-page essay to a professor who is unsympathetic to students’ struggle to connect to the internet. A story that broke my heart was about one student who was forced to go up a mountain during the middle of a storm just to take an online quiz, on a laptop she borrowed from someone, connecting to the internet via cell data. It is disheartening to see that the current system of education doesn’t even care to think about these situations.
And it isn’t just the students getting the short end of the stick. Teachers, technologically savvy or otherwise, struggle trying to connect with their classes as well. Some teachers can barely navigate websites to deliver coursework to their students. And imagine an entire class taking place via video, where you can barely hear your professor because of background noise coming from outside the house, or the video constantly goes on and off. There are stories of teachers without internet connection spending their hard-earned salaries on barely functioning data plans that cost as much as a month’s rations and utilities. The price of a laptop, an internet connection—have these become the cost of education? Has the new normal made it pricier to learn?
A world that’s been stepping hard on the disadvantaged is now stepping harder, and we hear people say that we should simply “accept this new normal.” But–friendly reminder, especially at this wrenching time: Your normal might not be normal for everyone else.
