By now, nearly the entire Smith community has experienced online learning in one way or another. For some, the shift to Zoom happened in the middle of a crucial period for social development and the shaping of identity. As the world returns to some semblance of normalcy, I’ve pondered how the socio-cultural implications of the pandemic continue to manifest in life at Smith.
Faculty members have remarked on the slight dip in office hours attendance since the return to in-person classes, particularly with first-year students. Professors have been strategizing about how to encourage more students to attend; are donuts enough of an incentive? It wouldn’t seem so. Office hours facilitate the formation of meaningful relationships with professors and classmates; it’s one of the main draws of academic life at a small college. The overwhelming majority of Smith faculty members are welcoming, open to discussion and genuinely want to help their students. This reluctance is puzzling, but perhaps the floundering office hours attendance — among other issues — can be attributed to the cultural shift of the pandemic.
The impact of pandemic isolation on the social development of young children tends to be more glaring than it is in teenagers and young adults. My elementary school-aged brothers, for instance, spent a considerable amount of their early education on Zoom, and I can’t help but wonder how this is going to affect them as they grow up. The youngest — aged six — is terrifyingly proficient with an iPad. Perhaps this is the reality of our future, but the veil between real life and the screen’s imitation of life seems to have grown incredibly thin. I’m not saying that I, as a young adult, am an exception to the detriments of being a student in a pandemic era. In fact, I think it’s easier to overlook how COVID-19 has affected the lives of high school and college students; we’re more self-sufficient and being left to our own devices (literally) for hours on end isn’t as much of a concern.
Spending idle time on our phones everyday is one thing, but when technology becomes our primary means of connecting with the world — and learning — it’s hard to imagine this not creating difficulties in social engagement. For me, as well as many of my peers, the transition back to in-person learning was simultaneously relieving and stressful. While I once again had the healthy sense of stability and purpose that comes with a daily routine, there was an underlying sense of panic that I couldn’t just turn off my camera if I needed a moment to myself. But I had survived twelve years of school without the option of being able to tune out for a quick break, so why was I so desperate for one now? For all of us, returning to the real world of school and learning was jarring in some aspect, no matter what stage of education we were in at the time.
Even if it was only over the span of a few months, many of us quickly got used to the level of removal from social obligations remote learning afforded us. The everyday burdens of being a student combined with the college applications many of us were dealing with — not to mention the added uncertainty of a mysterious virus sweeping across the globe — created an overwhelming environment of dread. The transition to Zoom, whether we welcomed it or resented it, gave us a respite from the unrelenting pressures of the world. Using every ounce of our Gen Z resilience, we adapted.
Despite our flexibility, remote learning simply cannot offer the same level of rigor and engagement that in-person learning does. The ability to turn your camera off or play a video game in a separate tab — which I think we can all admit to doing at some point — allows students to get by somewhat without dedicating their full concentration to the class. It is unrealistic to expect college students to have fully recovered from this habit in such a short period of time. At Smith this year, we no longer have the option of joining class via Zoom if we’re sick or have been exposed to COVID-19, attending class remotely is at the discretion of individual professors. While this accommodation certainly had the potential to be abused by students, it was also comforting to have the reassurance of still being able to get the basics of class content in the event of illness. The removal of this safety net adds an additional dimension of stress.
With this in mind, I’ve come to understand why so many students — especially first-years — aren’t taking advantage of one-on-one time with professors. Small group interactions with a mentor can already be intimidating and being unaccustomed to such scenarios only exacerbates the challenge. Ironically though, office hours provide a more personal setting in which students can express these concerns. Many of us seem to have forgotten that the majority of professors tend to be understanding about issues facing students.
Social anxiety is very real and can be felt on every level of interaction: from peers to professors. At a small college where developing relationships with professors is both beneficial and crucial, this social apprehensiveness can pervade academic life. And while it’s great to acknowledge this issue, what are elite higher education institutions like Smith doing to address it?
By and large, the risk of adolescents and young adults developing severe COVID-19 symptoms is low. But as we’ve seen, it is the socio-cultural repercussions of the pandemic that are felt — even now — most keenly by this demographic. We’re college students, but many of us have scarcely left adolescence; let’s not mistake resilience with maturity. The effects of the forced withdrawal from social interaction must be taken into consideration going forward as we come to terms with our new reality of “endemic” COVID-19.
