The two narratives will be the views of two different peoples’ perspectives of online education which has become the norm due to the everlasting threat of a global pandemic.

Narrative 1

Hi there, my name is Joe and I am 15 years old. My school, just like every school in the world, has moved to being taught online. At first I thought this was great! I no longer had to try and scrape together any money I could find to buy nice clothes so that I wouldn’t get bullied. The school also said they would give me a laptop! It was amazing for the first 2 months. By the time November came around, I really started to miss my friends. I would still see the other kids in my building, but we weren’t allowed to hangout together or play basketball together anymore. It started to be really boring. Even the laptop, once I did an update on it, it got really slow. I tried to tell my counselor about it but he said that’s the best the school board could give. My family doesn’t have much money, so we didn’t have a laptop of our own. At first the slow laptop was okay, just annoying. Then, my Social Studies teacher wanted me to do a video project. Every time I tried to record my video, it would lag! I explained this to my Social Studies teacher but she said that it was my responsibility to figure it out. I was really bummed out. I just wish we could go back to in-person learning.

Narrative 2

Hi everyone, my name is Jim and I am 15 years old. Due to the pandemic that does not seem to be going away anytime soon, my school is fully online. I was both happy and sad when school went online. I was happy I didn’t have to follow all the rules that teachers have for in-class time and that I can just finish assignments whenever I want during each day. My only responsibility is to make sure everything is in on time which is easy enough. My parents paid for me to get an online tutor too so sometimes I can just ask him and he will just tell me the answers! My parents bought me a new laptop, top of the line, fastest streaming and recording speeds and everything, especially because I had to video call my tutor and I hate when it lags. I was sad that I could not see my friends though. My friend group is all people like me, we all live in the same neighbourhood and go to the same country club. I miss seeing them at school because of all the fun stuff we could do, but I still see some of my friends who are on sports teams with me. I think this is fine for now until we can get rid of the pandemic since all the young people I know still have some social time with people their age. I hope I can go back to in-person school one day, but maybe if it stays online I can get a new top of the line desktop too!