By Makenzie Walsh
While plenty of people yearn for homecoming, crowds, parties, and being with their unnecessarily big friend groups (you heard me), there are a large number of people who were overjoyed to know that they no longer had to be dragged into unwanted social interactions like the pre-Covid world was swarming with. How do I know? Because I am one of those people. Now, sit down, because I know more about this topic than you extroverted plebs.
Distance learning is the ideal setup for those afraid of, don’t actively seek, or simply do not enjoy interacting with other people. This is mostly because none of us need to interact much or at all. We can just turn off our microphones, and cameras if possible, and if we really have to say something, both Google Meet and Zoom have chat boxes.The only downside is that teachers who flat out ignore or don’t respond to messages sent via chat can become annoying in certain situations. Use the chat; it is not that difficult. Your students are asking questions in there. Now answer them or we will all collectively have a stroke.
Others love the social aspect of high school. Usually all I, and I think it’s safe to say other introverts, just need our (Often relatively small) group of friends and whoever we have befriended online in terms of social interaction. That and family members, but not everyone has good relationships with them.
Another appeal of in-person school is the class discussions, Socratic seminars, popcorn reading, a lot of other things I’m probably not thinking about. The fact of the matter is, for us introverts, these exercises suck. “TuRn To ThE pErSoN nExT tO yOu AnD dIsCuSs YoUr AnSwErS” shut up. No. Cease. These are honestly as awful as group projects, and those are almost always disasters. Now, behind a computer screen, they are simply not our problem anymore.
That’s going to have to be all, I’ve got some important ignoring-the-scam-that-is-society to do. Hopefully, this gave you extroverts a different view on the current situation (Oh, it better have or else I’m gonna-)
