Insanity Descent

How COVID Impacted my Schooling

Oh BOY, do I have a LOT to say about this... As a student who is in my school's gifted program and was signed up for several CHS classes this year AND wants to go to college to major in chemistry, I kind of find school and good grades REALLY fucking important. I basically define who I am by my grades, which I'm aware is a toxic mindset that's destined to cause way too much stress for me, but I'm so fucking lazy that otherwise I'm not motivated to do shit. Just because I'm supposed to be book smart doesn't mean I know what the fuck a healthy lifestyle is.

Well... I'll start from the beginning.

In March of 2020, I got sick for like a week. I was already skipping lots of classes because at the time I was going through an intense depressive episode, so getting sick really pissed me off and discouraged me further from trying to escape the hole I'd dug for myself. I was failing English because I'd skipped that many classes, and in my trig class I barely had a C- because I pretty much only attended that class like once a week due to skipping so much.

I was miserable and the thought of trying to learn or focus on school was literally repulsive to me. I dreaded being in the building and I often fantasized about just throwing myself down the stairs or jumping from the school's second floor balcony. I'd often bang my head on the walls and stab myself with pencils and pens, even if I didn't draw blood. Hell, at one point I was given an emergency expulsion {which I've gone into more detail about in a separate post on this book}.

So... once I was sick that just discouraged me even more. But then, while I was sick, I heard on the news that tons of schools were shutting down due to COVID. I asked one of my friends that goes to the same school as me over Wattpad DMs if our school was closed due to COVID, and she told me it was. My school soon issued an email to all students informing them that learning would take place remotely through an application called Zoom, which I'd never even heard of until then. The email also said that teachers would post assignments in Google Classroom and to check that frequently.

I attempted to attend Zoom calls and complete my work in Google Classroom, but my Wi-Fi connection was too slow. As I've stated before in previous posts I live in extreme poverty- we live off of government welfare because my dad is physically incapable of work due to disability, and they are the most stingy fucking people ever. I'm unable to get a job as well because we cannot afford the gas money in transportation due to the fact we live far out in a rural area.

Due to our financial circumstances, the only form of internet we can afford based on the literally two plans available in our area is by using a tablet with service through U.S. Cellular and then using said tablet as a hot spot. My dad pays about $10 a month for an unlimited data plan with a 2 GB data slowdown, but even so the 'fast' Wi-Fi is not fast enough for things like live streaming {which is required for services such as Zoom}. It's still significantly faster, but it still wouldn't be fast ENOUGH. I don't know the exact connection speed of the faster internet before the slowdown {I would estimate maybe 500 KBPS}, but I do know that once the slowdown is reached that it slows down to about 10 KBPS.

I've had to run numerous downloads for games that take place over the span of days, and most of the games I download are through Steam, which tracks your Wi-Fi speed as well as the highest spike in your speed. Most downloads spike to about 25 KBPS for a few seconds, but there was ONE time I saw it spike to about 40 KBPS. Consistently, the Wi-Fi fluctuates between about 5 and 15 KBPS, so an average of around 10 KBPS. In a single day, I can usually download about 800 MB of data, assuming I do not pause the download at any time. Also, for reference, dial-up Wi-Fi is about 100 KBPS and lots of people complained that was slow. Try my internet.

Because of my extremely slow internet that caused me to have to wait literal hours for Google Classroom to open and outright refused to connect me to Zoom for more than a few seconds, the school said they would give me a Wi-Fi hot spot provided by them and would be capable of fast internet speeds. Perfect solution, right?