Caitlin Musich, junior at Hillsdale High School
The Catalyst (TC): What is the typical day of school like for you?
Caitlin Musich (CM): We have all our odd classes [on] Monday and Thursday and all of our even classes [on] Tuesday and Friday. And then Wednesday you go through all of them for almost half an hour. You have to log in to the zoom class you have to stay there for the whole duration of the period. And then you just log off and enjoy it until the next class.
TC: How are you coping with shelter in place and keeping in touch with your friends?
CM: When I first started in quarantine, we started hanging out with the same small group of friends, and we started with masks and somewhat social distancing, and then as time went on, we would take off our masks, and then we’d be in closer proximity. So socially we’ve been just fine keeping in touch with our friends because we were able to slowly go back into it and make sure that we were staying safe.
TC: How has life at home, been since the shelter in place?
CM: I drive my mom, a lot more insane because I’m always home which gives me a greater opportunity to get in trouble. But it’s just weird because I’m such a social person that I hate being home, at any chance I would get I would want to be out of the house. All three of us [parents and brother] are online, it sucks up a lot of the internet and it’s frustrating because we’re all kind of fighting for that Wi-Fi connection…so everyone is sort of quicker to get mad at each other because we are together all the time.
TC: Do you wish that Hillsdale did anything different with distance learning?
CM: Not really. I mean, I think they’ve done a good job making sure that all of the classes are pretty hands-on, we definitely go into a lot of breakout rooms, so we can still kind of have like that group project sort of thing where we can bounce ideas off of each other. The teachers are just doing their job. I just love how hands-on they’ve been, it’s a lot easier to learn and they’ve kind of made the transition between in-person learning to zoom learning more fluid.
TC: What do you like the best about distance learning?
CM: It’s more tech-savvy. I’ve also gotten better at problem-solving for them [problems], just like thinking out of the box to fix the problem.