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Collingwood student opens up about learning from the edge of her seat

A condensed senior year with a lot of flux and little fun has proven difficult to balance for some
2021-04-09 Paczesny JO-001
Rachelle Paczesny is a Grade 12 student at Our Lady of the Bay Catholic High School in Collingwood.

Parents and students have dealt with a lot of changes when it comes to education this year.

Throughout the 2020/21 school year, some students have flourished and others have struggled between lockdowns, shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, remote, in-person and hybrid-model learning, causing students to have to adapt week-by-week.

And, according to some, the quality of their education and their mental health may be suffering.

“I feel anxious a lot of the time. This whole system makes me feel so anxious. I’ve always had a little bit of anxiety going into a test, but if I don’t break down one week now, I’m proud of myself,” Rachelle Paczesny told CollingwoodToday.ca.

And she’s not the only one.

“I’ll cram the night before a test, and at 2 a.m. I’ll look in our shared (Google Classroom) document, and all my friends are also in the document,” she said.

Paczesny is in Grade 12 at Our Lady of the Bay Catholic High School in Collingwood.

The Catholic school board, as well as the public school board, is using the quadmester model to limit mixing of cohorts, while simultaneously using hybrid learning at high schools. While Paczesny is currently learning in-person, she said it can be a strange experience learning this way.

“It’s definitely not the same as school before. Currently, I’m taking chemistry, and in that class we have two or three online kids. There will be times when the teacher has to speak directly to the kids online through her computer. It will be weird because we’ll hear her talking, but it’s not to us. We can’t hear their questions, only she can,” she said. “I feel safe in class, but if some people don’t, I understand.”

Paczesny has applied to post-secondary schools for September, however she says she’s undecided about whether she’ll take that route or defer. She said she feels unprepared to take the next educational step.

“I have concerns. I want to go into bio-medical engineering, so I took a lot of difficult classes this year and last to get into university. I didn’t think they’d be as condensed as they were, so if you were to ask me about something I learned in biology (last year), I’m not convinced I’d be able to answer,” she said.

“Doing quadmester... everything is so condensed. You’re just regurgitating. You’re not remembering. You don’t really have enough time to learn and grasp the concepts,” said Paczesny.

“My teachers have all be great. They’ve taught me so much. They managed to make it work. But it was all in my short-term memory, not long-term,” she said. “I’m worried.”

Paczesny said she’s relieved there is a break next week. The recent onslaught of new information from the provincial government regarding a shutdown announced last week and a new emergency declaration and stay-at-home order this week has been a lot to process, she says.

While Toronto and Peel’s medical officers of health have made the call to close schools, Paczesny says she’s glad Simcoe-Muskoka hasn’t taken that step.

“I don’t like online school personally, but if it would be for the greater good and they just close it for two weeks to get rid of a variant, that’s fine,” she said. “If there was a specific plan in place and it didn’t just go up and down and we didn’t have to be thrown off-guard week after week, I’d appreciate that. I think my friends would too.”

Paczesny said the daily timings of provincial and federal announcements can make it difficult for students to watch them live, however she says students do keep up to date on current events to see how they’ll be impacted.

“We all do pay attention. It’s like we hang on to the edge of our seats. Am I coming to school tomorrow? We’re in lockdown, we’re not, we’re in half-lockdown, or we’re not. I never know what’s going to happen, or if I’m going to be in school the next week,” she said.

She also disappointed she likely won’t be able to attend a prom or graduation this year.

“The class of 2021 didn’t get their entire senior year,” she said. “They’re going to try but if we keep being locked down like this, we’re not going to get anything. We all bought prom dresses, but we’re never going to have a prom.”

“We’re holding on to the little things because we’re banking on the big things never happening for us,” she said. “I’m hopeful it gets better.”

The flux of the 2020/2021 school year also has parents anxious. Daniela Schulze’s daughter is in Grade 12 at Collingwood Collegiate Institute.

“As a parent of a current Grade 12 student... I am finding it hard to keep the motivation for learning to keep moving forward,” Schulze told CollingwoodToday.ca.

Schulze takes issue with the quadmester model, noting it “is not real-world learning or a realistic model.”

“The subjects that my child had in quadmester one seems like it was a life time ago. If those same subjects are not ones they have until second semester next year, there will be an 18-month learning gap,” she said. “It will be yet another burden for students to find the required tutors to do the catch-up.”

Schulze said she feels the minister of education has let down thousands of students by not having a comprehensive testing and vaccination plan in place.

In light of the province’s decision to keep schools open, while some health units in Toronto and Peel have decided to close their schools, Schulze said she doesn’t have concerns about the safety of her daughter in a classroom.

“I don’t have concerns... because we live in an area where the case load has been quite low,” she said.


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Jessica Owen

About the Author: Jessica Owen

Jessica Owen is an experienced journalist working for Village Media since 2018, primarily covering Collingwood and education.
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