Anna, who is a 15-year-old teen from Germany, has to participate in school from home since the Corona virus is spreading in her town like a wildfire.
Like every morning, Anna got up at 6 o´clock on Wednesday, May the 5th. She was an only child and her mother was at work. Her father was still asleep because he works from 9pm to 5am so she was the only one awake. She got dressed, grabbed a bowl of cereals and continued watching her favourite series in the living room. While watching the drama of the characters, she ate her breakfast and thought about the lessons coming up that day. She wasn´t 100% sure if they had Biology or German in the first period and decided to text her best friend Max and ask him about it. As she sent the message, she remembered, that he never got up earlier than 7:50 am during Homeschooling. Anna usually is and always was more responsible than him and she tries to be as productive as possible. Max always mentioned how he´d apparently love to change Anna´s internet connection with his, since she got kicked out of her video conferences a lot. Anna herself always panicked when that happened and worried about missing important things in a subject. In contrast to her, Max wanted to use connectivity or server problems as an excuse to miss one class or two. His biggest problem with Homeschooling was not being able to meet his friends and joke about with them in class.
It was around 7:45 when Anna got up and sat in front of her computer to enter her class. She wasn´t really interested in Biology but still tried to concentrate. Max joined the online meeting too late again (as usual). It was hard for the two of them to understand the teacher due to the bad sound quality of his microphone.
Luckily, Anna didn´t get kicked out once this time and during her first break, she checked her messages. One of her online friends, Cass Johnson from New York, messaged her, telling Anna about her day and life in America. She wasn´t allowed to go to school either, so they had the chance to compare their school system during the pandemic. Cass´ internet connection always was amazing. Probably due to the country she lives in. Everybody knows that Germany isn´t really further developed in such things. Cass´ has always been doing her school stuff from home without a break since the virus broke out. The servers they used for meetings and online classes were able to withstand the high number of users from the start of the lockdown. All her classmates and Cass herself could follow along their lessons and had more options to arrange their lessons. Anna was jealous of that system, wishing to have such quality in Germany as well. In her next class, Anna had Music. They just had to do some exercises and sent them at the end of that period. Her music teacher didn´t even know how to start a conference. In her next class (Physics) she had bad connection problems and spent half her time trying to rejoin the conference.
Being a dedicated student, she finished her homework quickly and helped Max with his so he could send them in before it was due. She thought about how much she was missing her „normal“ life, just going to school as usual. Just then, she got an email saying that school wasn’t going to start next month either …
written by Merle S. (8f)