Corona: how varsity students can survive long, irregular breaks

Uncertainty easily passes as a synonym for the Covid-19 pandemic. Near everything, including education timetables, is hanging in abeyance in Kenya as it is across the globe.

Critically, the schools were closed mid-March, just when Kenya announced its first cases of coronavirus infections.

President Uhuru Kenyatta has alluded to the anxiety among the Form Four and Class Eight students, who are scheduled to sit for national exams by end of the year. However, Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha, has said the priority is controlling the disease, not returning to school.  

“The lives of students are more important than education,” Prof Magoha, a medic, said.  He has just appointed a nine-member team, led by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) chairperson Dr Sara Ruto to design a return-to-school formula.

When uncertainty rules, young people, the bulk of them in schools and universities, are likely be reckless with their lives: no need to read, entertaining thoughts of dropping out of school, facing venereal diseases and unplanned pregnancies and marriages, or turning the lives of parents and guardians upside down.

But parents and guardians, will, in such cases, recruit the learners into economic activities “now that you don’t when schools will reopen.”

It is the season of destruction for the learners, who require pit-stop guidance to make it to the next school season.

For university students, the missteps above are more tempting, especially because almost all of them are adults and entertain thoughts of starting a family or sexual relationships with no disastrous consequences. Worse, their parents can’t persuade them to read since the latter are more informed on matters reading, education, and careers.

This creates a discipline gap.

There is little or no useful learning, what with the controversies surrounding virtual learning. However, life could be different for students of private universities that, thanks to resources and smaller enrolment, have navigated e-learning with considerable success.

So, how can university students, some of them already cohabiting in school, preserve themselves under the Covid-19 uncertainty?

Fatigue and lack of innovativeness are some of the reasons students were likely to turn to illicit sex, clash with parents, and go to extremes.

Claudia Garcia-Moreno, the leader of World Health Organisation (WHO), has observed that domestic violence cases rose when countries imposed lockdowns to contain the disease.

In Kenya, the National Council on Administration of Justice (the Ombudsman) reported a rise in sexual offences.

“Covid-19 has created a tense atmosphere everywhere. Accepting the new normal instantly was the only choice to prevent one from being infected,” noted Mr Kibira Kibira, a Laikipia University lecturer.

Students, he said, should not waste precious time, but focus on more productive living.
According to Caitlin Nevins, a psychologist at McLean College Mental Health Programme (CMHP), while we encourage students to practise gratitude, disruptions were still expected.

Nevins says students should exercise self-compassion while their families ought to manage their feelings by making communication a priority to take care of shortcomings.

Winston Churchill asserted that “danger gathers upon our path” and none should look back. “We must look forward,” he said, mirroring the innovativeness, including the shift to online classes and learning.

Indeed, while Kenyans have been ranked among people with poor reading culture, a forward-looking student could use the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to learn reading widely.

Extra-curriculum activities like sports have no room due to social distancing, but university students could reinvent social media life by encouraging one another on career aspirations, right relationships, finishing pending school projects, and helping parents.

Learners could also turn to hobbies like writing. If not writing fiction, one could acquaint self with the more rigorous and vigorous academic writing by mastering citation rules like APA and Harvard.

Lecturers keep reminding graduate students that final defences are “nit-picking” steps that require unfailing mastery of the academic steps. You either get the nuances right or miss the graduation bus and its perks.

This is can also the time to immerse oneself in search for entrepreneurial ideas, design them, and attempt writing a business plan, especially those who keep dreaming of building business empires or being own boss.  

In all this, keep keeping fit, mentally and physically, through regular jogging, biking, walking and lifting weights on your own or at carefully selected gyms should be a priority.
Let’s wrap up with Martin Luther King Jr, who said that the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but one’s position during challenges and controversy.

This is the time to choose life, not death or destruction.