‘New normal’ not for everyone

July 2019 BQ (Before Quarantine), the average student’s daily life basically involved waking up, getting dressed, going to school, doing a bit of homework in the library, heading to a part-time job, and returning home. That was normal.

March 2020 saw a drastic lifestyle change to which no one knew how to react. People were suddenly unemployed. Students who worked at part-time jobs suddenly couldn’t leave the house without being harassed by the quarantine police. And lives were lost in the blink of an eye.

Things changed from the daily norm we had grown accustomed to, and now we are forced to accept this strange new world.

My mother is a working mom and a leader in our church. This means she needs to attend meetings via Zoom or Facebook Messenger or any other communication app. On top of everything else, she is studying for a master’s degree, which requires the use of Zoom.

My younger sister, a junior high school student, attends classes daily in her bedroom using our father’s laptop, while my other sister sits in the living room waiting for the website where she needs to view her class coursework to load.

All the while, my father, who occasionally attends court hearings via Zoom, sits in his bedroom hoping to connect to the courtroom so he will not lose his case by dismissal.

Is this the “new normal” being advertised to us? Definitely not, but it’s the one we have no choice but to accept.

It is not easy to forget that we live in a Third World country. Among other things, internet connectivity is not as fast here as it is elsewhere. If a middle-class family is struggling to keep up with education because three siblings have to attend classes all at the same time, all with their own bit of technology and forced to share a shaky internet connection, how much more difficult will it be for a lower-class family, already struggling to pay for food and water, to afford the internet, the gadgets, or even the textbooks required?

And how much help is it for the school or university to release statements such as “if you do not have your own internet connection, go to the nearest internet café and log in for class”?

A simple online search will lead to horror story after horror story, involving students trying their hardest to submit a one-page essay to a professor who is unsympathetic to his wards’ struggle to connect to the internet. A story that broke my heart was about one student who was forced to climb a mountain in the middle of a storm to be able to take an online quiz on a laptop she had borrowed from someone, desperately trying to connect to the internet via cell data. How disheartening it is to see that the current system of education is blind to, or doesn’t even care to consider, these situations.

And it isn’t just the students getting the short end of the stick. Teachers, technologically savvy or otherwise, struggle to connect with their classes as well. Some teachers can barely navigate websites to deliver coursework to their students. And imagine an entire class taking place via video, where you can barely hear your professor because of various noises coming from outside the house or the video constantly turning on and off.

There are also stories of teachers without internet connection and spending their hard-earned salaries on barely functioning data plans that cost as much as a month’s rations and utilities. The price of a laptop, an internet connection — have these become the cost of education? Has the new normal made it truly more expensive to learn?

A world that has been stepping hard on the disadvantaged is now stepping even harder, yet we hear people saying that we should simply “accept this new normal.” But — friendly reminder, especially in this wrenching time—your normal might not be normal for everyone else.

* * *

Ethan Mosuela, 20, works as a photographer and graphic designer in Angeles City, Pampanga.