I’m (not) too cool for school. Today is March 31.

Regardless of how much I wish I could graduate now and sit outside in nature all day, I must sadly trudge through the tedium that is high school for at least a little while longer. I woke up around 9:20 a.m., early enough to grab a muffin and send out one of our newspaper editor’s editorials in favor of Columbia Public Schools adopting a pass/fail grading system for the semester. After about 30 minutes, I even put on real clothing before joining my Advanced Placement (AP) Literature class’ Zoom call.

We talked about what topics we will cover going forward and how changes will affect the AP test this year. While the call didn’t last long, talking to people I am not biologically related to was a nice change of pace. After we hung up, I got a text from a friend of mine who is in the same AP Literature book group as I am. We are the only two people in the class reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. She let me know she, too, had completed the novel and was getting started on the assignments related to the text for this week. 

I had already finished the individual one, but I decided to crack down and complete the group assignment, too. Writing my initial response analyzing the literary elements McCarthy used to create a specific mood in the book’s first scene took me about half an hour. We then proceeded to text each other throughout the day as we finished our required responses. Because there are only two of us, we didn’t encounter the usual problems of one word contributions to class discussion boards or hollow, unsubstantial replies. Her insights were interesting and helped me think about the text in a new light, which I greatly appreciated.

I checked my email throughout the day to make sure I hadn’t missed any updates from teachers. Since I had completed the assigned work for two of my classes already, I decided to spend today focused on journalism. For the better portion of my afternoon, I went through posts on Bearing News and cleaned them up because we are still potentially in the midst of our national competition season for the National Scholastic Press Association. I am proud of how the website is looking and impressed with the quality content our staff members are producing.

At 1 p.m. our advisor, my fellow Editor-In-Chief and I had a Zoom meeting with the staff’s various section editors. Although we experienced some slight technical difficulty with unreliable internet connections, the conferencing platform worked well. We were able to discuss our plans going forward and outline clear expectations for how points and stories will work amidst the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing procedures. I am excited to see what everyone decides to create, and I think their contributions will help Bearing News succeed in the upcoming national “Best of Show” competition.

For the rest of the afternoon, I worked on shoveling the In-Depth print stories from earlier this month. I meticulously worked with tooltips (clickable icons) and various other interactive elements on Bearing News to make each post engaging, and I am proud of how they turned out. While I wish I had devoted a little more time to studying and working on AP Calculus AB, I am confident I will have plenty of time in the next few days to complete my assignments. I am worried about my upcoming test, but because I am taking advantage of my teacher’s office hours and dedicating focused, lengthy periods of time to study and prepare on my own, I am optimistic. 

“Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, American author

How did you spend your fourteenth day of social distancing? Let us know in the comments below.