Corona Diary: Day 0
The diary of a student who is no longer in school, following what this new virus means for us
It’s hard to comprehend exactly what’s happening currently: a few weeks ago the corona virus was a rumour in another country, and now it’s affecting every part of our day-to-day lives. There are queues outside the co-op, many public places are shut and, most impactfully for us young people, the schools all around the country are closed.
This gets even more incomprehensible when it comes to year 6, 11 and 13- the exams that we have been working towards have been cancelled. GCSEs, A-Levels, SATs. All of them are off the table. For me, a year 11 who has been revising and stressing and preparing for these exams for two years now, this is too much to make sense of. Many other pupils feel the same way.
My year 11 blazer and shirt- signed by lots of my classmates and friends.
We went into school today, unsure of exactly what was going to happen. Were we still expected to do work? Was this going to be like an extended holiday? How were we going to get our GCSE results with no exams?
It ended up being like the last day before the summer holidays. The teachers brought in cake, we played games, everyone got their shirts signed. Yet beneath the whole day was a bittersweet undertone, an atmosphere of dread as we all felt the wave of everything that was happening building up, the realisation of what no school really meant. Sooner or later it was going to crash down on us.
That crash came in the last lesson of the day, with Mr Rogers’ assembly for year 11 and 13. He told us how sorry he was to see us go so early, and how he would try his best to get us the grades that we deserved, and how we were like a family. One by one, everyone in the hall started clapping. Then we began to say goodbye to people- people we’d known since year 5- and we were all crying. Crying and hugging and saying goodbye. It hit us all then.
This is not where any of us expected to be this Friday. Not the students. Not the teachers. Not anyone else around the country. We’d joked about school closing, and we’d been talking about the holiday we were going to have, but none of us had considered what the situation really meant. And for year 11, it meant saying goodbye. Crying and hugging and saying goodbye.
Will we get to go back to school? Was that our last day? What’s happening with our exam results? None of us know the answer. All we know, as students, is that our education has been cut short, and this virus has taken away a huge, important portion of our school life.
It’s impossible to tell what’s going to happen in this unprecedented situation, especially over the next weeks of quarantine. All we know at the minute is that it was too early to say goodbye.
by Lily Tibbitts
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Lily well written, echoes how the whole school community felt
Lily your words brought me and Nanny to tears. We know how hard you have worked and hopefully that will be reflected in the grades awarded to you. Please ensure that you, Mum and Dad and Ava stay well until we are all able to meet up again. Love you all x x x x
Well done, you used the phrase ‘unprecedented situation’ xxx