This article is the first part in a three-part series that explores the continuing effects of COVID-19 on education. Also, check out “COVID-19 Still Affects Education” (Jan. 12) and “Podcast: COVID-19 Changed Schools Fundamentally” (Jan. 15).

From primary to postsecondary education, COVID-19 has caused detrimental effects that are difficult to abolish. According to the Indiana Department of Education, standardized test scores have slightly increased from last year. However, students are still not as proficient as they were prior to 2020. The pandemic also negatively impacted the social, emotional and mental well-being of students.

The difficulties students are facing are perturbing teachers and school corporations.  Along with the decline in general comprehension, teachers have noticed that mental health problems have increased dramatically since the pandemic in 2020. Simultaneously, there was a decrease in motivation and social interaction.

“I am definitely noticing a steady decrease in attention spans and general knowledge of my students, although I am not sure how much of it can be explained by the pandemic,” Grant Howerton, a middle school English teacher, said. “Kids are coming into my seventh-grade classroom with major gaps in their knowledge, and some of those gaps are explainable if you see which grades they were in during the height of COVID-19.”

The holes in students’ educations appear to be the newest epidemic throughout the nation. Another seventh-grade teacher was found in the same predicament as Howerton and went viral for sharing the underperforming levels of his students on TikTok. In his video, he states that his students are performing at the fourth-grade level, which is around the time students and teachers were forced into online learning.

“At first, COVID-19 simply meant two weeks off of school,” seventh-grader Gabryella Ashby said. “However, once the pandemic escalated, we missed out on a year’s worth of education. Although we attempted to work online, it was extremely difficult and not efficient. There have been multiple times where my teachers have had to stop the lesson to simplify and reexplain to the class.”

Slowing down the learning process has been an aspect of recovering after the pandemic. There have been many videos posted online responding to the initial seventh-grade teacher. The most popular received over 18 million views and consisted of another middle school teacher stating he has had to pause his class to teach students how to spell simple words such as “window,” “important”, and many others.

“Since the pandemic, I feel like I’ve lost out on learning some important things in school that I should’ve otherwise been taught,” junior Katelyn Maxson said. “It affected the amount of material that teachers had time and resources to teach over Google Meets. The pandemic made me lose motivation towards wanting to go to school and learn new things and also turned me into a procrastinator who was always pushing assignments off, and my work ethic turned to lazy at times. It has taken a lot of self-discipline to change my old habits from COVID and to go back to being a timely and hardworking student again.”