After the pandemic took high school online and into the home, Jackson Miller discovered his city in new ways through exploration and adventure and learned about community values along the way.
When the pandemic started, and online school still wasn’t set up, I had to find ways to satisfy my curiosity: learning about my environment, the people who were products of it, and their unique perspectives and views on life. This kept my innate enthusiasm to learn satisfied throughout what would’ve been a bleak time.
The first thing I did when the pandemic started was pick up skating. It was a trend, but I also thought that it could keep me fit and with a challenge to tackle. After a month of practice, skating around the city was no problem. I met some other skaters, and we would spend our days exploring new parts of the city. I learned how cities were organized, and about different cultures that inhabited different parts of the city, and a wide breadth of architecture.
It was with my girlfriend Azadeh that I got to dive into this architecture. She was taking a class on classical art and knew all sorts of facts about the styling and functionality of buildings around the city. One building that enamored us was the De Young Museum. Its bold, iconic architecture fascinated us almost as much as the classic and contemporary art it was filled with. Exploring art this way was an opportunity to learn things I couldn’t in class.
When school started again in person, I was able to take the perspectives I’d gained with me back to class and used them to succeed. The things I learned about correlated with what I was learning in my Human Geography class. How art and culture diffuses across spaces, city planning, and concepts like new urbanism were all things I had learned about during my time adventuring. Having explored the city while focusing on what made it special enabled me to bring unique perspectives to class discussions in a way I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Skating, learning about art, and exploring the city were only meant to keep me engaged during quarantine, but these experiences opened my eyes to opportunities to learn and grow in ways I’d never seen before.