Entering the second semester of his eighth grade year in 2020, Bobby Arnold dreamed of what his freshman year at Johnson Senior High School would be like.
Football was the main thing on his mind. Then COVID-19 struck the nation and the world shut down.
“Everything stopped. Everything changed,” Arnold said.
His next four years of high school were far from the picture he’d imagined.
Arnold’s experience mirrors that of many current graduating seniors across the Twin Cities. Everyone was stuck where they were when the pandemic hit. But, for the class of 2024, this pause happened during a particularly formative year.
Processing through poetry
Though this year’s graduating class has had a far different high school experience than any generation before them, they persevered. While isolation during those first two years of the pandemic was certainly a challenge, so was reintegration into a classroom environment. This became apparent for Arnold when he found himself taking his academics more seriously and picking up a larger workload his junior year. He was juggling a range of demands including pressure to figure out what he wanted to do for a living after high school.
“Trying to worry about my future, what I want to do with my future … it was really clouding my mind, clouding my vision,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘What do I do? What do I do to get this off my chest? I was like, I’m going to write it out.’”
Like all young people, Arnold had many dreams growing up. He was drawn to art and music. At one point he wanted to be a musician or a rapper. He wrote his debut poem in eighth grade during Black History Month. Little did he know then, he’d return to writing as he processed life in the pandemic. Poetry was a sanctuary for Arnold. It was how he worked through his own mental health struggles during times of isolation and pressure.
“I just loved it. Poetry was always just another form of music,” he said.
This year, Arnold published a collection of his poems titled “The Falling Uprise,” which is sold at Barnes & Noble and on Amazon. The collection includes “poems that show how on our uprises in life we will still feel like we’re falling,” according to the book’s description.
The high school senior knows he isn’t alone in his feelings of isolation or his struggles processing the constantly shifting world around him. He said he hopes writing will help others feel less alone.
Inspired by his teachers and mentors, Arnold looks to become an educator so he can also help support future generations. He plans to attend Augsburg University, where he will study education.
A hard year to talk about
It can seem society has experienced a sort of collective amnesia when it comes to memories of the 2020 pandemic. Thomas Edison High School seniors Eleanor Maddison and Abdihafid Mohamed agreed.
It’s hard to talk about that time, Maddison said. For schools in the Twin Cities, the 2020-21 school year started remotely. When schools began to bring students back to in-person class in 2021, there were still disruptions and fears around the virus.
Maddison felt extremely isolated at the onset of the pandemic as they tried to adapt to remote socialization.
“To me, even today, when I have a video call with someone I know, it doesn’t register to me that there’s like a real person on the other end,” they said. “Sometimes it’s like watching a TV and they’re kind of interacting a little bit. So that was really hard because I felt like I was getting nothing outside of my immediate family.”
Sophomore year things started to return to “normal,” Mohamed said, but he found that school year to be challenging in its own way. Things weren’t back to how they were and he quickly became acutely aware that his time in high school was limited.
“I was just like, ‘OK, my high school experience is gonna start next year. It’s gonna start next year,’” he said of the transition from one year to the next. “Now I’m starting to realize, hey, this is my high school experience as weird as it looked, as weird as it felt. I’ve now come to grow with it and be accepting of it, but I’m a little jealous that other graduating classes get to experience it in person.”
Through the abnormal times, Maddison picked up crocheting and crafting, completing one of their goals last year — to sell work at a craft fair.
“I just needed something to do, especially with my hands, and that was something I could do when I didn’t have anything else going on,” they said. “It was a way I coped with my mental health for a long time.”
It takes time to figure out what you like to do, Mohamed said of his years growing into his own.
Freshman year, Mohamed decided to focus on his grades. He picked up video games, which he used as a way to stay connected with friends. Sophomore year, he tried out basketball but that wasn’t his sport. It wasn’t until junior year that Mohamed found his favorite part of his high school experience — the debate team.
“I wish I’d joined (debate) earlier,” he said. “But it was really weird during online (learning) and the transition through sophomore year wasn’t all that great.”
Despite facing particularly challenging times in their youth, the students are hopeful about the future.
Maddison said they can’t wait to graduate this year and move out west and study Zoology at Oregon State University in the fall. Mohamad plans to double major in political science and computer science at the University of Minnesota. Ultimately, he wants to become either an intellectual property or patent lawyer.
Advice for the upcoming generation
One consistency between Arnold, Maddison and Mohamed, is they all seem wise beyond their years. When asked what their advice would be for upcoming generations of high school students, these were their responses:
Arnold: “The best time to rest is when you truly don’t have time to.”
Maddison: “It sometimes feels like things will never change, and then there’s tomorrow.”
Mohamed: “Do everything and anything when you have the opportunity.”
A story of resilience
School faculty and staff have been working diligently to provide youth tools for entering adulthood.
Longtime Edison counselor Todd Tratz is quite hopeful for this year’s senior class. While they’ve faced many challenges, they’ve also shown a great deal of resilience, he noted.
“Students have become more aware of their emotional needs. I think they became more independent, because they were forced to be,” he said.
Many also learned to organize their time better and break down large assignments into more manageable tasks, he added.
When schools switched to distance learning, counselors and teachers found each individual student faced their own unique challenges, said Johnson High School counselor Samina Ali. Some students were charged with watching their younger siblings at home, others had internet issues. Isolation took its toll on many student’s mental health.
Emphasis was placed on checking in on students who were failing classes or missing class, “making sure no one was falling through the cracks,” while helping students find a post-high school plan, she said.
“As educators and counselors, we were trying our very best to connect with students, but it’s difficult to do that if you physically can’t make that connection,” Ali said.
Arnold is one of the seniors with whom Ali works. While students are often inspired by adults, Ali emphasized that they are generally even more inspired by their peers. For example, Arnold’s classmates look up to him for publishing his book and are able to see themselves in his writing.
School is not just about academic success, Ali said. It’s about overcoming challenges of all kinds. That could mean something as simple as learning how to reach out for help.
“It’s important to learn we all need help sometimes,” the counselor said.
Winter Keefer
Winter Keefer is MinnPost’s Metro reporter. Follow her on Twitter or email her at wkeefer@minnpost.com.
