As the COVID-19 pandemic had begun to strike the United States in 2019, eventually all schools had to shut down in response to rising cases. With this unfortunate occurrence, education had to experience several changes in order to continue teaching. 

Eventually causing us to switch in person learning to completely virtual. Teachers and students had experienced huge changes in education in a matter of weeks. 

Unfortunately this change isn’t easy causing many students that experienced trouble adapting to the best of their abilities to be able to continue long distance learning. Teachers were also heavily affected by this change, since most of their teaching styles were not easily adaptable to online teaching. Not to mention, many of these teachers were completely new to the idea of using technology full time to teach lessons. 

Mrs. Verderosa, a Spring Valley High School teacher said, “I think it’s impacted our way of teaching because we have so many different approaches. Before COVID, not every student had a chrome-book so we were very limited on how we could teach. It simplified the process of how we could give information to students.” on the way, online teaching had changed her teaching style. She then said, “I think we both struggled a lot but for very different reasons. For teachers it was a matter of changing a teaching style used for 10 years plus and transferring it online. But I think students also had it very difficult. Many students were not familiar with how to use computers, they had to learn to manage their time, they had to work on self discipline so that they weren’t sleeping or playing video games, i think it was really difficult for teachers and students for different reasons.” regarding the adaptation process made by both teachers and students.

Fortunately after around 2 years of teaching long distance, we eventually were able to return back to the conventional teaching style of in person classes. Although this change was also rough due to the amount of time spent adapting to online classes. For both teachers and students, this change caused multiple problems. Mrs. Verderosa said, “I think especially in the beginning teachers had to recreate so many things online that we have continued to use those things in person. So I feel in the beginning we were doing a lot of stuff on computers and defeated the purpose of being in person again.” on the matter of going back to in person teaching. When asking Mrs. Verderosa if online learning impacted her teaching style in any positive way she claimed, “I think mostly it’s positive but I do think one thing that is negative is that when we were all online it was very interactive and now that we are back in school I think we are still a little bit still reliant on our computer when we could be doing hands-on stuff again.” Students were also faced with issues that developed over the two years spent learning online. Some of these issues being anxiety, introversion, stress, and financial insecurity.