It was the Monday that we all got back to school from spring break. The vibes on campus for me personally were weird because I had absolutely no motivation to do work. I went to my three usual classes that I had on Monday’s which were French, Women’s Studies and my Communication class. The whole day I felt as though I was a doll that needed to be winded up just to get through the day. I wasn’t ready to be back at school and most of that was because over break I was enjoying my time at home. Despite the fact that I had zero motivation, I forced myself to do the work that needed to be done. I woke up the following day, still feeling like a wind up doll, and went to my French class and my Communication discussion. In my Communication discussion class we were assigned a group assignment. While my GSI was assigning the group project she kept talking about how she didn’t know if we even would be doing the assignment due to the Coronavirus. At this point I didn’t really take what she said seriously because I couldn’t imagine the United States in a state of a pandemic. I finished my day by attending my baseball and softball training for Big Ten Network student university and my friends came over to chill in my room.
We were sitting on my floor in my single room in South Quadrangle and were all scrolling on our phones. “Damn Michigan has its first couple of cases of corona,” I said to my friends as I was scrolling on my Twitter timeline.
“I know this shit is crazy. I hope they close schools down,” said my friend Omar in response.
“I would pay literal money for the state to close schools down,” responded my friend Hanna. Little did we know this was not what we wanted at all. We all thought that schools closing down was going to be like an extended summer vacation when it really wasn’t going to be this at all. We thought we would have more time to spend with our friends but we didn’t know we would literally be quarantined in our homes for months.
My floors GroupMe chat was going absolutely insane. People were asking if we were going to be let out of school and what would happen to classes but these were all questions that would be unknown until the next day. Just know that none of this went how we thought it was going to go.
Fast forward to the next day, Wednesday. I woke at 10:30 and got ready for my Communication class. As I was getting ready I checked my group chats and I checked Twitter. I saw that the confirmed cases in Michigan were really local in relation to Ann Arbor and to the city that I’m from. That instilled a slight fear in me that I really didn’t have prior to seeing the locations. It also didn’t make it better that the University was being pretty silent which was crazy to me since a case was literally at the University of Michigan’s Hospital. It was 11:10 and I decided that I was going to start walking to my Communication class. When I arrived at class I looked around and kind of laughed in my head. This was a classroom that had probably somewhere around 120 students in it but let me tell you that there were no where near 120 students in class this day. My professor started to talk and thanked the few of us that showed up to class for showing up and then explained how he doesn’t know what the future was going to hold. There were a lot of rumors going around so everybody was unsure but all I knew was that I wanted to go home. When that class was over I went back to my room to wait for my Women’s Studies class to start but instead I got an email from my professor. The email was talking about how for our safety the remainder of that class would be on some alternative form and the lecture for today would be canceled until they figured out how to go about the rest of the year.
“Cool, so I’m chilling until my Women’s Studies discussion and Creative Writing class,” I thought to myself.
As soon as I could get the thought out I received another email in regards to my Women’s Studies discussion saying that we would be using some type of platform called BlueJeans for discussion today. At this moment I had no idea that this was going to be the way most of my classes would be set up for the remainder of the semester or maybe even longer.
Shit finally got real for me when I received that final email. The email that would tell us that classes would go virtual starting next week. I was so excited that as soon as my Creative Writing teacher canceled his class I packed some stuff and immediately drove back home. My excitement was soon turned into something else other than excitement once my first full week of online classes finished. I didn’t realize that having online classes would be so difficult to be honest. I didn’t realize how much I was gonna miss Ann Arbor, especially because it was my first semester at Umich. I kind of felt robbed of my Umich experience. I didn’t realize that the Coronavirus would spread so quickly and cause numerous deaths resulting in the Stay at Home order. I guess the good thing for me was the fact that the Stay at Home order wasn’t put in place until after my birthday which was March 14th so at least I got to celebrate my birthday because I know so many people that didn’t get to do that. I guess the whole pandemic and the closing of schools showed me that everything is not what it seems and you might think you want something but in reality it’s not what you want at all. We all thought that we wanted schools to be closed because of Corona but look at us now. We are all bored and miss our old lives. So here I am today on April 12th wondering when our lives will go back to semi normal. Honestly I don’t think things will be much of “back to normal” because I think a lot of things in the United States will change as a result of the pandemic. I just don’t think we’ll take things as a joke anymore because I know for sure when this all started out everybody used to joke around about it. I guess you really don’t understand the severity until it hits you close to home. Seeing that so many people that I know or am related to have had Corona have personally opened my eyes to things that I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to like politics. I guess the whole moral here is don’t take things for granted.
Kori Tucker || Ann Arbor, Michigan/West Bloomfield, Michigan || March 9, 2020-April 12, 2020