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Sleep longer in the morning.

Carry out tasks in the baggy training pants while listening to music or watching YouTube.

And make the schedule yourself - homeschooling, the student variant of the home office, sounds tempting.

In the first moment.

But the longer the corona-related state of emergency lasts, the more worried the students in the graduating classes.

That they are missing out on even more subjects when schools close.

That they are not properly prepared for the exam.

Or that they become infected after the schools open and fail to take important exams.

"I am nervous.

I could get sick, have to be quarantined.

What then? ”Asks 18-year-old high school graduate Emili Walter.

And what most school leavers may not be aware of is that even if they do solidly in the exams, students who miss classes for a long period of time earn less than those with a full program over their entire working life.

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This is what studies have shown that have compared data from various countries over the past decades.

Germany's students are now entering the second lockdown - most of them will not be able to make up for the gaps that this leaves in the teaching of teaching material.

"During the first lockdown, I thought it would be over quickly," says Emili Walter

Source: Emili Walter

If Emili wants to know what the coming days look like, she has to check her email.

She is in the twelfth grade of the Stromberg high school in Vaihingen an der Enz in Swabia.Get ready, get on your bike, after a quarter of an hour finally up the hill to school, first lesson from 7.30 a.m. - that's how her days began for years.

With Corona, that's over.

Nothing can be planned now.

Not for Emili, her classmates, the families.

How the lessons work is “decided depending on the infection rate,” it says at the Stromberg high school.

Lessons on demand - at home or at school: "We always get an email on Fridays, so we know how it's going," says Emili.

“During the first lockdown, I thought it would be over quickly.

It's a bit like being sick.

But the longer the school was closed, the more worried I got. "

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First there were e-mails with tasks, then work with learning platforms, video conferences.

“Of course, this cannot replace face-to-face teaching,” Emili Walter is now clear in part two of Lockdown and Homeschooling.

But until February 14th, it will predominantly remain with distance teaching, even if the federal states handle the school closings with different degrees of strictness.

The gaps that this creates are getting bigger and bigger.

In April of last year, when schools were already closed, 37 percent of upper school students spent less than two hours a day doing “school-related activities”, as surveys of the last two high school classes in eight federal states revealed.

This not only alarms education experts, but the high school graduates themselves. Almost half of them stated at the time that they are very or very worried about their school performance in view of the loss of lessons.

Around a third fear disadvantages in later professional life.

And these fears are likely to become even greater with the new lockdown and school closings.

"Corona is making the scissors bigger"

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Leonard Homuth currently has more obvious concerns.

He is 19 years old, goes to the Anne Frank Comprehensive School in Bargteheide north of Hamburg and either wants to train as an industrial clerk or study economics or social sciences.

Depending on how good the graduation is.

For now, there is one thing Leonard doesn't want: school.

He is a high-risk patient and feels safer from infection in distance learning.

For him, learning from home is no problem, you just have to be well organized, he says: “I can do it.

Everything can be done in two to five hours.

But you have to be careful that you don't get into a stuck mode, sleep in late, postpone tasks and so on. ”But Leonard also sees that homeschooling has other pitfalls.

"In subjects where you have problems you tend to fall behind"

Source: Leonard Homuth

"The scissors are getting bigger as a result of Corona: in subjects that you are good at, you can improve yourself by studying at home because you have more time and peace of mind," he says.

“In subjects in which you have problems you tend to fall behind.

You can then not easily acquire the material yourself. ”For students who are already weak in school, who cannot motivate and organize themselves and do not get support from parents or siblings, Corona, lockdown and school closings mean that they are notice even less material and fall back even further.

For all students, however, the following applies: the less material they are taught and the more they are confronted with longer lessons absences during their school days, the more negative this will affect their later professional life.

Distance teaching means that there are cutbacks in school material and thus in “competence development”, as experts put it.

And that means for the later working life, to put it simply: fewer good jobs and thus less wages.

Possibly over your entire professional life.

The ifo Institute has calculated that students affected by missed lessons as a result of the pandemic have to expect an average of around three to four percent less earned income if around a third of a school year is lost.

Expressed in lifetime income, the loss of income for people without a vocational qualification amounts to an average of 13,500 euros, for school leavers with subsequent apprenticeship around 18,000 euros and for university graduates around 30,000 euros.

The interaction between missed lessons and the loss of later income has been well researched.

There are studies from Canada, Belgium and Argentina after lengthy teacher strikes, but also from Germany.

In this country, at the end of the 1960s, the beginning of the school year was uniformly postponed from spring to late summer.

In many federal states, two school years had to be significantly shortened for this.

Affected students had an average of nine months fewer lessons.

According to an Ifo study, the result was that these school leavers “achieved an average of around five percent less earned income in their working life” than schoolchildren who had completed the full teaching time.

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The author of the study and head of the Ifo Center for the Economics of Education, Ludger Wößmann, draws two scenarios for the consequences of the current failures: On the one hand, there is the risk that more students than usual will not be sufficiently prepared for exams and will fail.

Or the level of the exams will be lowered so far that potential employers can no longer assume a comparable school leaving certificate, he summarizes.

"This would put the affected vintages at a disadvantage compared to others."

If there are further school closings due to a pandemic, the problem will worsen.

“The reaction has to be that the curricula are adapted, that one focuses on the important topics and leaves out less important areas.

Because only what has been conveyed can be checked, ”demands Woessmann.

The students deal with the challenge differently.

“I think a lot about whether university operations can start as planned in autumn.

And for those who want to do an apprenticeship after school, the economic situation will not be favorable to start their professional life, ”says Emili Walter.

"It is clear that we will not even be able to complete all of the examination material, so we will leave school with gaps in our knowledge." In mid-February, face-to-face teaching should start again at her school, that much is certain.

Leonard Homuth is a little more relaxed: “I am sure that I will get the apprenticeship position I have in mind.” Whether the grade point average will be good enough for the desired course is open.