I’m further curious about this, because I completed a collegiate degree during COVID and the remote aspect made it one of the best school experiences of my life. Arguably, I am a millennial, and I had previously dropped out of school twice due to a combination of doing poorly in school because I was working so much, and not really making enough money to keep going without incurring massive debt to achieve it. COVID was the first time for me where everything came together well enough for me to be able to work, go to school, and not be at the mercy of an overburdened personal schedule to achieve it, because of how much time being school-from-home saved me in transportation time.
I heard about some online school horror stories for like… elementary school kids. You know, when teachers didn’t understand that not all computers could do the fancy Zoom backgrounds and stuff, and gave some kids their first taste of what it feels like to be a have-not among a group of haves. A lot of crying and wondering why they couldn’t do something other kids could do, because the old teacher who wasn’t familiar with technology was oblivious and did something dumb in an attempt to get kids excited about online school. Sure, if this was your first school experience, it sucked.
I heard far fewer horror stories about middle-school/high-school kids, but if you’ve got some, I’m willing to hear it out (Full disclosure: I don’t have kids, so I don’t have direct experience). However, I am certainly hoping for a more detailed response than a single sentence saying they were all alone and depressed with ptsd. Because I didn’t feel disconnected from my friends, although I do live a “digital native” life and so do many of my friends simply out of necessity as adults because we became separated physically over time as our jobs took us to different places in life. COVID didn’t knock me on my ass and make me feel isolated, because US life had already forced me to adopt such things, but maybe I’m in the minority here.