Two Weeks?!
By Rebecca C.
I’m not gonna lie. It took me a while to get started on this article. Usually when it’s time to start working on our new publication, I excitedly start looking for people to interview or documents to read. But for this article, I had no one to interview, nor any reason to lurk around Teams for Word docs. I had to write about myself.
Ugh, I thought to myself. What was I going to write about anyway? Well, as you can see, I did in fact come up with something, and you are reading it now. Hopefully you like it, and perhaps some of you can relate to it too.
I have existed on this planet for fourteen years. For most of those years my world was what most people would consider “normal”. I went to an in-person school, played sports (not partially good at some of them but whatever…), was part of school concerts-- all of those things. But then, about half way through sixth grade this little thing called Covid happened and rocked the boat a bit. I remember reading the very first “School is Canceled” email and being distraught over the fact that I would have to amuse myself for two weeks during online learning. “What on earth am I going to do at home for two weeks?” I thought to myself at the time. Boy, I had a lot to learn.
But when the school closures turned from weeks to months, I found plenty of things to do at home. That neighborhood cat who shows up at our house a lot? Why not make friends with her? The Pixar movies? Why not watch them all? That story you started writing? Why not finish it? In fact, though it started out as a burden, I quickly found that I didn’t hate online school so much--perhaps I even liked it!
But whether I liked it or not, it was not going to be a permanent solution for my school. So just like every year, in-person classes started up in the fall. Except… it wasn’t like every year. Masks were everywhere, old friends had moved to new schools, and just nearly everything had changed. And though I’m not sure I realized it at the time, but I had changed too. I had gotten a taste of online school, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the fact that I could get my work done at any time of the day, the fact that I could spend more time with my family, and work on projects I was interested in. In a nutshell, I could be a little more me!
There were dozens of reasons why my parents pulled me out of school half way through my seventh grade year and enrolled me at NSA, but flexibility was one of them. Why should I have to choose between working on a short story today and working on that science project? Why not do both? While there are plenty of things you can learn from school, there are also plenty of things you have to do to understand it.
Eleven year old me never would have thought that any good would have come out of Covid. Honestly, fourteen year old me is a bit surprised that something did. But still, even in the midst of a horrible event like a worldwide pandemic, God was doing something good. He was getting me ready for a big change-- a new school, a new way of life, and a new me. :)
“We don’t become different people as we age. No, I believe that we become more people. We’re still the kids we were, but we’re also the people who’ve lived all the different ages since that time.”- Nicholas Benedict, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages
Columns: 🗞️Staff Stories
Rebecca C. started at NSA in January of 2021. She lives in Massachusetts in the US. She is in 8th grade and enjoys filmmaking, writing, and loves animals.