A lot of my students were able to adapt to online and then hybrid learning platforms easily enough, but the biggest impact of Covid just seems to be the lingering malaise. The common refrain seems to be that they feel a bit cheated; in Japan, college are your free years. You work your butt off to graduate high school and get into university. Once you graduate university, you're in the meat grinder of the business world until you reach the safety of retirement. So college is when you get to experiment and run a bit wild. Only these students haven't been able to do that, obviously. So, even though the schools did whatever they could to get the students online and into classes, my students seem to feel that, minus the accompanying rewards, it's just not worth the effort of studying all that much. Every bad score gets an asterisk next to it (*during COVID) and graduated is just about assured, so why bother doing any but the bare minimum? And so, while there's no denying that there was an impact on their learning, the bigger impact to students was the lack of social dynamism and campus life that has characterized the pandemic years. And, personally, I think that will ramifications for society long past whatever effects were caused by having a bit less English practice.
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Just to be pedantic (and just for fun):
I'm not sure that "global pandemic" is actually redundant. My understanding is that you could have, for example, an African or European pandemic if the disease was found in several distinct regions of those continents.
Also, as a literary function, pleonasms can be used for emphasis and I think the case could be argued that, in the beginning at least, it was an intentional redundancy to emphasize the scale and scope of the problem.
Besides, using "global" sets a good precedent for when the Martians come and our only defense is to create an interplanetary pandemic. :)
A lot of my students were able to adapt to online and then hybrid learning platforms easily enough, but the biggest impact of Covid just seems to be the lingering malaise. The common refrain seems to be that they feel a bit cheated; in Japan, college are your free years. You work your butt off to graduate high school and get into university. Once you graduate university, you're in the meat grinder of the business world until you reach the safety of retirement. So college is when you get to experiment and run a bit wild. Only these students haven't been able to do that, obviously. So, even though the schools did whatever they could to get the students online and into classes, my students seem to feel that, minus the accompanying rewards, it's just not worth the effort of studying all that much. Every bad score gets an asterisk next to it (*during COVID) and graduated is just about assured, so why bother doing any but the bare minimum? And so, while there's no denying that there was an impact on their learning, the bigger impact to students was the lack of social dynamism and campus life that has characterized the pandemic years. And, personally, I think that will ramifications for society long past whatever effects were caused by having a bit less English practice.
***
Just to be pedantic (and just for fun):
I'm not sure that "global pandemic" is actually redundant. My understanding is that you could have, for example, an African or European pandemic if the disease was found in several distinct regions of those continents.
Also, as a literary function, pleonasms can be used for emphasis and I think the case could be argued that, in the beginning at least, it was an intentional redundancy to emphasize the scale and scope of the problem.
Besides, using "global" sets a good precedent for when the Martians come and our only defense is to create an interplanetary pandemic. :)