Effect of Pandemic on the Scholastic Achievement of Students

March 16, 2020, a day after placing Manila under Enhanced Community Quarantine, Mr.
Rodrigo Duterte, announced that the rest of the country be also placed on lockdown and that all
people should stay home. Thus, all establishments were forced to close including schools. The
lockdown was expected to last for only a month, so the idea of not going to school was
welcomed by the students since for them they were given a mid-school vacation break. However,
nearly two years after the announcement, schools remained closed, and from face-to-face classes,
it shifted to online learning and modular learning. Instead of going to school, listening to
discussions, and participating in learning activities guided by teachers, students are left to learn
on their own and manage their own learning.
“Learn on our own, manage our own learning,” it sounds sophisticated, and it sounds like
we students are very clever and capable, but, have we, the students, really learned on our own
that we could still say every end of the school year we have advanced one step higher in our
scholastic journey?”
With online classes, we are forced to a draining learning environment full of distractions.
Draining learning environment since sitting in front of a computer or a celphone to attend classes
for several hours a day is very tiring and straining, physically and mentally. Physically, it’s not
healthy to just sit without breaks for several hours, especially to the torso and to the eyes.
Mentally, online classes are exhausting since there are a lot of distractions that compete with a
students’ attention in online classes. Distractions like the physical and emotional environment at
home and the temptation of online entertainment like social networking sites, and Youtube
channel. Not only that, even with online discussions, we are still forced to learn on our own and
manage our own learning because online classes has its limitations like, we cannot really
approach our teachers for help freely like when we are physically in school. So if there’s
something that we don’t understand, we are left to solve it by ourselves, it just remains as
something we do not know.
For modular learning, students are expected to really learn on their own as they answer their
modules and do the learning activities by themselves or by the help of their parents. In this kind
of learning set up, teachers are not around to help and guide the students.
Just imagine, school students as young as I and even those who are younger, especially those
students whose parents are not around to help them, and those students who may have parents
beside them but are very busy because food must be put on the table, do you think we could have
learned as we should?
The honest answer is not. We are students after all. It means that we should be guided in our
learning.
But as for the matter of scholastic achievement, maybe, the pandemic has not stopped students
from moving one step higher in our scholastic journey, however, scholastic achievements still
and should equate learning.