The Unsettled Semester

Jessica Orozco has a system. At the start of a new semester, she prints out the syllabi for her courses. Then she combs through them, one by one, adding each assignment’s deadline to her Google Calendar. This semester, though, a few professors mentioned that their syllabi were still shifting, so she didn’t bother with any of that. Those deadlines and details, thought Orozco, a sophomore studying journalism at Ohio State University, were only going to change.

If this past spring semester was defined by the sudden shift to remote instruction, the theme of the fall has been sustained uncertainty. Sure, some students are back on campus. But the usual patterns of living and learning there are gone, and students know any new routines they create are subject to the trajectory of the pandemic and colleges’ changing policies.

For many students, “going to class” this fall might mean putting on a mask, applying some hand sanitizer, and walking into a lecture hall for one course; logging into Zoom for another; and working asynchronously with a professor and classmates they never see in a third. Things are weird for everyone, but not weird in the same way. There’s little sense of a shared college experience.

A cloud of change hangs over everything. Classes that are running in person could move online at any point, and at colleges that are asking students not to return after Thanksgiving, all of the courses will, eventually. Deadlines spelled out in the syllabus might be extended; assignments might be altered or nixed.

Orozco is a good student. In her family of six siblings, she’s the studious one. In high school, she was her class’s valedictorian. But being a good student isn’t simply about being book smart. It’s about developing and sticking with a set of habits: going to class and paying attention, taking good notes, studying instead of just reading, knowing when and how to ask for help. It’s about being organized, keeping a schedule, staying on top of classes.

But this unpredictable semester has broken Orozco’s good habits. Motivation is harder to summon. Attention is harder to sustain. Details are harder to keep track of. Orozco has had to lower her standards for herself. “Honestly, with this semester, I just say: Like, whatever,” she says. “I just do what I can.”

Like so many other students, she’s just trying to get through it.

When Orozco’s courses moved online last spring, she hated it. She missed the stimulation of being in the classroom, the connections with her classmates and professors. Those things, Orozco knew, enabled her to learn.

As the spring and especially summer went by, Orozco decided she wanted to head back to campus and take classes in person when the fall semester started, in late August, but she wondered how much time she’d actually get to spend in a classroom. She noticed other colleges’ moving all of their classes online. Soon enough, her schedule started to turn increasingly virtual. The international-studies course Orozco planned to take was moved from a hybrid format to an online one. Her Spanish course would be online, too, though that was her choice: Her mom had worried about the number of students in the in-person section. By the time classes began, three of Orozco’s five courses were online, and one was hybrid.

Only one course, “Crime and the News Media,” was set to meet fully in person. That meant adjusting to a bunch of new safety precautions. There were only around 40 students in the crime course, but they met in a large auditorium in Sullivant Hall, a building used mainly for dance and the arts. That allowed everyone to spread out, leaving more than six feet between students.

A large screen behind the professor, Felecia Jones Ross, displayed both her slides and the Zoom session she’d set up for anyone who was in quarantine or uncomfortable attending in person. Ross used a microphone so that everyone could hear her. When students had a question, though, they had to yell.

At first, pretty much everyone was in the auditorium. But as time passed, Orozco noticed, fewer and fewer students showed up there, and more and more were on Zoom.

That meant Ross had to adjust her teaching. She had to be careful to speak right into the mic so students at home could still hear her. That meant she couldn’t move around the stage — or make much eye contact with the dwindling number of students in the room. Some students, Ross knew, were in quarantine. Maybe, the professor thought, others simply felt more comfortable on Zoom. She noticed a big drop in in-person attendance after Labor Day. Perhaps, she thought, some students had gone home for the break and didn’t come back to campus.

When Orozco went to class the following week, only one other student was in the room. That evening, Orozco saw a message from Ross on the course website. From here on out, it said, the class would shift to Zoom.

Her first reaction was shock. Then she thought about things from Ross’s point of view. Hardly anyone was coming to class anyhow. Why take a health risk to teach two students?

Orozco understood. Still, she was disappointed.

On Wednesdays, Orozco had a routine. She got up at 7:30, ate some breakfast in her single, a cinder-block room in a 13-floor dorm, and turned on the news. She did her makeup and put on a nice outfit. Other than taking her temperature and typing it into an app that also asks whether she has any Covid-19 symptoms, getting ready felt pretty normal.

By 8:45, she was out the door for a 15-minute walk through a pretty part of campus, on her way to the in-person session of “Writing and Editing for Media,” her hybrid course. Walking to class, she could tell there were fewer students around than usual.

Fridays, when the course met online, were another story. Orozco would roll out of bed shortly before the class began and log into Zoom. Since she hadn’t taken the time to get put together, Orozco would often leave her camera off. She’d multitask, getting ready while listening to the class. She wouldn’t leave her room until she ran out for lunch. She’d eat it back in her room, ahead of her remaining classes, which were also on Zoom.

Whenever Orozco logs into an online class, she tells herself that this time will be different. This time, she will focus. And she will, for a while. But she’ll hear noises outside her room. She’ll catch her mind wandering. The professor might be boring. Sometimes the internet signal is weak. Before long, Orozco will realize that the lecture was going in one ear and out the other.

Sometimes, Orozco will look at her phone during an online class — and then catch herself. But her phone isn’t the only thing sapping her attention. Once, when Orozco was visiting her family for a long weekend, she accidentally left it in the dining room, where she had eaten lunch, before starting her class in another part of the house. Even though the phone was elsewhere, she found herself staring out the window, zoning out.

“I realized that it doesn’t matter how many devices I have around me to distract me — I’m still going to be distracted,” she says. “I think it’s just being on Zoom.”

Orozco feels disconnected. Her professors and classmates feel distant. She doesn’t feel as if she’s in class.

Before class began on Wednesdays, Orozco and her classmates would wipe down their desks and sanitize their hands. They wore masks. Stickers showed students where to sit, to maintain six feet of space between them, and some of the chairs had been removed.

Orozco would find herself thinking about her chair. It’s upholstered, so it’s hard to wipe down effectively. Maybe, she’d think, there are virus particles in the fabric. “What if the particles are seeping into my clothes?”

It was a distracting thought; Orozco couldn’t decide if it was a rational one. She has an anxiety disorder but has been doing a lot better since she started taking medication last year. Not sure whether to trust her own perspective, she asked some friends for their take on the chair thing. Most thought it was nothing to worry about. Wiping down the chair should kill any virus particles. But one friend — who, Orozco notes, doesn’t have an anxiety-disorder diagnosis — said that she thought about it sometimes, too.

In the weeks leading up to the semester, as she learned the details of the campus-safety plans, Orozco had imagined that precautions would be in place for in-person classes, even though she wasn’t entirely sure what they would be. Plexiglass dividers separating students from the professor, and from one another, maybe?

Orozco took it upon herself to be careful. Sometimes she’d meet a friend for a socially distanced meal in the dining hall, if it wasn’t too crowded. Sometimes she’d go for a walk, or run an errand, or meet a friend in a photography course outside, to act as her subject. For the most part, though, she stayed in her dorm room.

It made her feel “paranoid,” she says, but as soon as she got back from her in-person classes, Orozco would change out of her carefully chosen clothes.

Attending class on campus presented its share of challenges and distractions for Orozco. So did her family, which was never far from her mind. She went home, to West Carrollton, outside of Dayton, Ohio, as often as she could, even if home never gave her a real break from her coursework.

Every Tuesday, Orozco went to the Jesse Owens North Recreation Center for her required weekly Covid-19 test. Every Thursday, she would wake up early, panicked about the email that would reveal her result.

Despite the stress of waiting for that email, taking the Covid tests gave Orozco some peace of mind before she spent long weekends with her family. She waited to leave campus until she knew she’d tested negative.

Orozco’s mother, Andrea, says she’d have wanted her to come home even if the tests were not available. The family is close-knit, and it was a stressful time to be living apart.

Still, Orozco’s mother worried about Covid. She’s an assistant manager at a Starbucks inside a grocery store, and many customers don’t wear masks or keep their distance. The local schools gave families a choice of in-person or online courses, and Orozco’s family opted to have her two younger brothers attend high school online. Her mother figured they’d end up doing so, one way or another, and starting online, at least, would be consistent.

In October, Orozco’s uncle tested positive for Covid. Although they live close by, Orozco’s parents weren’t able to help out as they would have done in a different kind of family emergency. There was nothing Orozco could do, either, but she worried about her uncle, her aunt, and her six cousins. The oldest, 17, was taking care of everyone.

Before the pandemic, trips home gave Orozco a change of pace, a chance to relax and stop thinking about her classes. But now, she found, her college and personal lives had blurred together.

In mid-October, Orozco noticed that her grade in international studies had dropped. She couldn’t figure out why until her professor, Ana Del Sarto, made a comment during the next class on Zoom. A bunch of students hadn’t turned in their last discussion post. That explained it.

The assignment had asked students: “How can we tackle environmental devastation? Answer the question with a general statement, and then make a list of actions,” both local and international. Orozco estimates it would have taken her five minutes to complete, 10 at the most. She just completely forgot about it.

Neglecting to do an assignment is out of character for Orozco. But none of her normal reminders were working. In another semester, she’d have written down the deadline in her calendar. She might have heard classmates talking about it. If the professor had reminded students about it in class, she would have been listening.

Instead, Orozco depended on the to-do list in the app for Ohio State’s learning-management system. The problem: That to-do list is auto-filled from information professors put into their course pages. If they don’t enter deadlines a certain way, then assignments don’t show up.

Del Sarto was understanding. She created a different assignment that students who’d forgotten about the discussion post could complete as a makeup. Orozco was able to restore her grade. Still, Orozco knew, she wasn’t acting like the Type A student she identifies as.

It’s not just deadlines that are slipping. Every week, Orozco has a quiz in her Spanish course. She’ll memorize the grammar she needs to know for each one. But afterward, she won’t remember any of it. That didn’t happen to her last year.

But everything is so different now. It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to interact with other students, to have even a simple class discussion. Wasn’t Zoom designed for conferences or something? Orozco wonders. It certainly wasn’t built for taking classes. “I just don’t think,” she says, “universities are meant to be online.”

The night before the first exam in her crime-and-the-media course, in early October, Orozco tried to set up Proctorio, the proctoring service she was supposed to use while taking it.

She couldn’t get it to work. After consulting Reddit and Quora, she figured out the problem: It wouldn’t run on an iPad.

Orozco doesn’t have a laptop. She got a free iPad and keyboard through Digital Flagship, an Ohio State program that gives all new undergraduates access to digital tools they can use throughout their education. For the most part, she’s been able to do everything on it that she needs for her courses. In rare cases when the iPad didn’t cut it, Orozco used to find a computer at the library.

Orozco emailed Ross to explain the problem, and the professor replied with a workaround: She would watch her take the exam over Zoom.

To make that work, Orozco took the exam during Ross’s Zoom office hours. She pulled up the test on her iPad, and logged into Zoom on her phone, positioning it so Ross could see her iPad screen as well as her hands.

Orozco wasn’t going to cheat. Still, there was something uncomfortable about being watched.

Ross had tried to put her at ease, saying that she would be drinking her coffee and doing some grading, proctoring just as casually as she would in a physical classroom. But Orozco still felt nervous. It reminded her of how taking a test used to feel before she went on her anxiety medication.

It was the start of a stressful period for Orozco. The middle of October was crunch time in many of her classes. She is mentoring six first-year students through the scholarship program that covers her tuition, attempting to alleviate their struggles while navigating her own.

And school never let up. The academic calendar normally offers something like interval training. Students face periods of intense coursework — like midterms — and then they get a break. But in their efforts to reduce students’ travel to and from campus and to get them through the semester, colleges have changed the calendar. A good number, Ohio State among them, got rid of fall break this year.

Orozco felt its absence. With midterms behind her, she tried to take her mind off school, but largely found she couldn’t. The weather was nice, so she did spend some time hanging out with her friends outside while social distancing. They ended up complaining about their classes. At least, Orozco says, there’s some comfort to be had in venting.

But even that limited socializing is over now for Orozco. All along, Ohio State planned to send students home for the rest of the semester at Thanksgiving break. Then, a week before Thanksgiving, Franklin County, where the main campus is located, was moved to Alert Level 4, or purple, for Covid, meaning it had hit six out of seven indicators “that identify severe exposure and virus spread for at least two weeks.” The university moved in-person classes to remote instruction starting the next evening, and Orozco moved out of her dorm and headed home days earlier than planned.

Going remote shouldn’t be as chaotic this time as it was back in March, Orozco expects. Most of her courses are online anyhow. She’s already attended some of them from home.

As distracted as Orozco has been all semester, she knows it’ll be even harder to focus from here on out. Now she’ll be dialing into class from the sewing table in her sister’s bedroom, since her own lacks a desk. She’s learned the hard way that it’s even more difficult to pay attention in class when she’s sitting on her bed.

Even after she gets through finals week, Orozco knows she won’t be done with remote classes. Ohio State will hold the first two weeks of the spring semester fully online. “I’m really hoping eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, it will be in person — safely,” she says. “Just because I’m not learning as well as I could be.”