Student Reflects On This School Year’s New Normal

At the beginning of this school year we were told that this year will finally be back to normal. After hearing the phrase “new normal” over the past years since COVID started, how is this year’s “new normal” supposed to be different from the rest?

Throughout all my high school experience, all I’ve heard was the phrase “new normal” and how this year is going to be as normal as possible, but at this point does it really mean anything at all? Does it really affect us anymore than the admin just telling us? 

We’ve gone from virtual learning being our normal with Zoom calls and staring at a computer all day with no contact, to wearing masks and keeping our distance from others along with any normal high school experiences like pep rallies or even just eating in the lunchroom, to finally going back to supposed normal without masks, and this year being told our “new normal” is being able to finally go back to the normal we were supposed to have all along. 

Going into the start of high school we were all hopeful for what the next four years would bring. With all that time to experience everything it had to offer us, or for some of us the hope that we would get at least one year of normalcy out of that four. We were totally oblivious that those hopes would be squished, leaving us to realize how much those little things actually mean to us and how much they make a high school experience what it is.

As a senior, my entire high school experience has never been normal. But is high school really a normal experience for anyone? Maybe this year we’ll finally get to see what this “normal”  high school year is by finally experiencing all the events we’ve heard hopeful whispers about from our teachers throughout the years. We all have our own versions in our heads of high school, whether we got inspiration from the movies we’ve watched like “High School musical” or from the crazy stories we were told about our parents’ experience.  For me the “’new normal” means never having to hear the phrase normal ever again for the rest of my high school career. I just want to enjoy it. Those may or may not live up to the versions in our heads, but hey, at least we’ll have something to compare to them.