Many of us this commencement season, myself included, are proud parents, marveling at the slow miracle of seeing a newborn grow into the confident young adult crossing the stage.

It’s a parental rite of passage: the tangle of pride, nostalgia, and hope that any parent feels when witnessing their child take this step into the future.

Yet this year is distinctly different. As Ateneo de Manila University President Bobby Yap, SJ, reminded a commencement audience a few days ago, Batch 2025 experienced “a unique journey.” Their entire freshman year unfolded online, under lockdown, deprived of the physical presence and interaction so vital to college life.

In their sophomore year, they finally arrived on campus, but masked, restricted, cautious. Still, they braved the risks and suffered the inconveniences, and finally saw classmates and professors in the physical world. They learned cherished school traditions, joined student organizations, cheered at basketball games, and gradually reclaimed a semblance of normalcy.

Batch 2025, my son Alon’s batch, will forever remain the last cohort to remember quarantined college life during a global pandemic. It was a time of isolation that, paradoxically, also bound us in the shared effort to survive and endure.

Next year’s Batch 2026 will have the fortune of all four years spent in full, face‑to‑face classes. It’s simply back to normal.

Batch 2025, the one that just graduated, may view their freshman year as a “lost” one. But for parents like us it was, in many ways, a year gained. We lived through lockdown as a family bubble — sharing all of our meals, telling each other longer stories, hosting watch parties, biking together with face shields on, and even giving each other what passed for haircuts. 

Quarantine started when Alon was still in high school. When online classes were still being set up, parents at home had to fill in the gap as ad hoc teachers. 

Preparing and giving lessons on literature, history and geography, I felt transported back to the 1980s when I taught adolescent boys in a large high school. The major difference was that my class in 2020 was composed of one adolescent boy, and our classroom was often the living room or our garden.

But that short time when parenting also became teaching in a structured way gave our bond a new dimension, while refreshing my own knowledge of whatever I had to teach. I can also legitimately claim that I was one of my son’s teachers, even for those brief few months. 

We were physically alone in our home or garden, and yet emotionally, we knew we weren’t. Parents and their kids around the world were experiencing the same situation of being stuck with each other 24/7. We all went through the same fears and the grief of losing friends and loved ones to the same disease. But it was also a time of physical closeness that may never come again. 

That extended to the quarantined first year of College Batch 2025. It was great to finally be on a campus the next year with everyone around your age. But many years from now, you’ll look back on that hybrid period of college — one year at home, three years on campus — and perhaps admit that it wasn’t so bad after all.