Roll out of bed, turn on your laptop, wander to the kitchen to get food during class – online school during a pandemic is pretty different from regular school.
And while some districts are in the process of bringing the youngest kids back to classrooms, the majority of older students will continue learning from home for the time being.
So what does a day in the life of a seventh-grader doing remote school look like? Romello, a 12-year-old seventh-grader in Tacoma, kept an audio diary of one school day and shared it for KNKX’s Take the Mic youth voice project. Romello has a YouTube channel called IBeRomello YT. He shared this story as part of a partnership between KNKX and the Tacoma Urban League.
Like most kids, Romello has things he likes and doesn’t like about distance learning.
“The good parts of online school are getting to be comfortable and you get to use the bathroom and eat when you want,” he said. “The bad parts of online school are that I don’t really get to talk to my friends or see my friends and I can’t really see my teachers, either.”
He misses sports – this was the first year he was eligible to play tackle football, and he was also looking forward to playing basketball. And Romello says he feels like he has a mountain of schoolwork to do.
“I work school hours and two to three hours after school just to try to do my homework, and at the end of the day, I still have more stuff to do,” he said. “There’s so much homework.”
We’d like to hear from more teens and kids about their lives right now – hard times, joyful times and everything in between. For more information on how to submit a story for the Take the Mic series, click here.
