As we approach the five-year COVID lockdown anniversary, a New York Times feature talks to a dozen Oakland Technical High School grads about how it affected them to spend their prime teen years stuck in their room, and just on Zoom.We’re coming up on St. Patrick’s Day weekend, though many will r emember that St. Patrick’s Day is also the day that lockdown arrived at 12:01 a.m. on March 17, 2020. The whole nation and world would quickly follow suit over this thing that at the time we called the “novel coronavirus,” and the five-Bay-Area-county shelter-in-place order was announced as being “in effect until at least Tuesday, April 7,” 2020. If we only knew what was ahead of us!The commemorate these years, the New York Times has an longform article speaking to a dozen Oakland Technical High School graduates, now 21 or 22 years old, on how COVID wrecked their high school years. They missed out on first dates, first jobs, proms and other such rites of passage during those COVID years where the time of day never mattered. The Times explains how they spent their days holed up “making TikToks, watching porn, playing Fortnite,” while hundreds of thousands were dying, and of course, they also endured the wild confusion of the orange sky day.Oakland Tech went “remote only” in March 2020, and their Zoom school day was only three hours long, starting at 9 am. Many students quickly learned how to game the system, logging in only long enough to be counted as present for the day, or muting themselves so they could engage in other forms of goofing off instead of schooling.Even when schools reopened, as the vaccines arrived in April 2021, the Times points out that “Chronic absenteeism soared in the pandemic to about 30 percent nationwide, and high school graduation rates dropped in 31 states, including California.” At Oakland Tech, the percentage of students who applied for and got into college dropped by four points.They did not just face learning loss, there was also a giant loss in these students’ social-emotional development. Many say they formed severe anxiety around in-person communication. They developed long-term habits to drink less alcohol (unlike the adults), and engaged in less dating and sex. During the COVID years, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that the percentage of teens who expressed “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 37% to 42%.The Times features a quote from Oakland Tech’s valedictorian of the Class of 2021, Ahmed Muhammad. Yes, the school had in-person graduation that year, albeit on a football field, with everyone masked and forced to be six feet apart. As Ahmed told his graduating classmates in the speech, “If our high school experience has taught us anything, it’s that we have absolutely no idea” what’s coming next.Related: It’s the Three-Year Anniversary of Our COVID-19 Lockdown, San Francisco [SFist]Image: @kpeastbayarea via Twitter ...read more read less