COVID 19 AND HBL DAYS

We are in Week 4 of Term 2, but I'm losing count of it as things had escalated fast since school reopened. We received many many news over the March hols and tightened up on many measures, there were a lot of talks about school closure even way before that but it looked like SG was dragging her feet to lockdown/school closure and it had not happened, even when our closest neighbour went into lockdown in the midst of our March hols. I could see that school closure is the last resort and we were trying real hard not to get there. We were prepared for the March hols to get extended but again it didnt happen. However, the numbers kept rising and we were really treading on thin ice as many colleagues and students went on SHN and LOA the first two weeks of school (those are alien terms before this COVID episode but we have gotten used to those terms once the hols started). *SHN- stay home notice LOA- leave of absence

At the end of Week 1, there were a lot of anticipation as we await some major announcement on Friday evening. We thought that school closure is finally upon us but it was just the start of one HBL (home based learning) day per week from Week 2 onwards.

End of Week 2, I had just finished lessons on Friday when there were lots of rumours and even 'leaked news' again. This time, I didnt believe it that much as there were way too many false alarm since February. However, PM made a sudden press release at 4pm that day and lo and behold! For the first time in the history of Singapore, we are moving into a semi-lockdown state call the circuit breaker and school closure finally happened! To be honest, I really want school to close and lessons to stop as it was really tiring covering for one another in school. But I was still kind of shocked after the press release. To put things into prespective, we only closed for two weeks during SARs and stopped lessons for one day when the haze was really bad in 2015. But this time round, it's at least three weeks or almost a month of no lessons.

And on hindsight, things got much busier after we started full HBL on 8th April. It's tiring and back breaking to spend the past 4 days staring at my phone and laptops the whole day long, the living room turned into my temporary work station. I wanted to blog to mark this period of time as the whole world (except China now) is in lockdown mode and nobody knows when this will end. But I was way too busy the past few days.