By National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), NIH Wikimedia Commons
BY AARON BARLOW
The need to migrate our courses online for a period of time, be it several weeks or the rest of the semester, has forced us to focus on something other than our primary task of teaching. We are having to turn our attention to a vehicle for instruction that many of us are not comfortable using, one many of us have rarely thought through carefully.
Asynchronous or synchronous, for example? And which is better. How do we handle office hours? What level of contact do we open ourselves up to? How do we approach attendance and conversation?
We have been making choices so quickly that many of us have not had the time to consider the implications of our decisions.
We may need to remind ourselves that, in many ways, we need to continue as we are, even in this new environment, to continue to be compassionate teachers.
There are plenty of people associated with our colleges who can aid us with the technical aspects of this conversion. It is going to be up to each of us individually to make sure we all retain our humanity through it and over the coming weeks and, maybe, months. We are going to get frustrated and students are not going to act in an orderly fashion—we are going to be herding cats, so to speak. When students ignore instructions, we maybe should point that out, but politely, realizing that they might not understand what is expected, that they are having problems with this new environment just as we may be. We should then find the point where confusion starts and walk our students slowly forward from there. This will try our patience, but we can’t risk their feeling shut out and being unable to proceed.
Over the past few days, as closings and conversions have mounted, few of us have had the time to be able to think clearly about our students and their needs. For the most part, we are focusing on the technical details of new configurations and on the directives from our institutions. Our colleges and universities are trying hard to cope with this but are focused on the daunting tasks of management in this precipitous switch, and not so much on the students.
That’s our responsibility.
One thing we ought to remember is that many of our students are likely to get sick over the next few weeks. Predictions are that between a third and two-thirds of us will contact COVID-19 before summer arrives. Most will not be laid up, but some will, and a few of those will be seriously ill. We need to make sure our class structures can handle that, and can handle the reality that students with elderly people in their homes (for commuter students, that may be many—but others will have returned home, too) may find themselves overwhelmed by responsibilities to others that take precedence over schoolwork. By the same token, we need to prepare our classes so that they can operate if and when we teachers are ill.
Synchronous classes, then, may not be the best idea. We cannot guarantee that students and professors will all be able to meet online at specific times. It would probably be better, also, to front-load our class sites as much as possible so that the students can continue if we are out of commission. It is easy to forget our own health and that of our students (not to mention their families and our own) while doing the sort of planning necessary right now and new to many of us, for we are concentrating, by necessity, on the apparatus and not the people at either end. Keep the students in mind always, but let’s not forget about ourselves.
It might be tempting to provide limited hours for telephone conversation with students, corresponding to office hours. This could be frustrating for students who cannot get through while we are talking to others. It might be better to ask students to communicate by email or text, with them providing phone numbers if you and they decide together that voice communication is necessary. You can then call them rather than the other way around. The trick is going to be organization on our end so that no student communication slips through the cracks.
The window for online participation in each assignment should be broad but not so much so that students will be putting off work. We may need to gently encourage students who are a little behind (by email), remembering that we don’t know what else is going on in their lives. Again, it’s extremely important that we retain our compassion, especially in online environments, which all lend themselves to abrasive verbal behavior.
As we all have seen in our classrooms, students rely on each other. We can use that even in our online configurations. Almost all of them now have smartphones; part of assignments can be for them to text each other on issues of concern to the class, possibly even forwarding the conversations to the professor as part of assignments. Students need to have as much latitude as possible and as many avenues of communication as can be made available.
This is going to be a difficult time. We will get through it if we concentrate on the things teachers are known for, compassion, patience and cooperation.
Good luck to us all!
Dear Mr. Barlow: You state that “One thing we ought to remember is that many of our students are likely to get sick over the next few weeks. Predictions are that between a third and two-thirds of us will contact COVID-19 before summer arrives.” What predictions do you refer to? Whose data? Under what assumptions? How is the probability derived? How do you define “likely?” Who is “our students?” Who is “us?” What are their health profiles and habits? What is the precise mathematical probability calculation; how is it weighted; what are the underlying programming codes of the prediction algorithm?
The predictions I am privy to in the federal government’s largest defense technical and modeling subcontractor, shows a likely hood of contracting the so-called COVID-19, equal to developing pneumonia (host-specific, therefore and not normally propagated), if even deeply exposed to a concentrated population of actual verified illnesses (there in fact are none, actually verified, at this point. It is all assertion), and a fatality rate no greater than certain flu virus. Otherwise the general probability is equal to being in an airplane accident. Rational empiricism in the Academy, or speculation and ideological groupthink?
The modeling was also focused more on mental barriers to narrative resistance, and ways to communicate the program that lower skepticism, and inculcate acquiescence. One modeling method uses celebrity and “authority figures” to notionally credentialize the narrative. It is combined with “sympathy” symbolism, such as public press statements by Hollywood actors like Mr. Hanks, that his wife was “infected.” So, indeed, it must be true. Other ways, at the campus level include, for example, the unfortunate president of the University of Texas at Austin, Greg Fenves, declaring by mass email yesterday, that his wife is ill, and that he is “self-isolating” (the new memetic, along with “social distancing”). He then summarily closed the entire university, upending 50,000+ students. He is obviously carrying water for the federal government, but wants anyone with a trained scientific mind even, to accept the absurd statistical improbability of exactly, and only, the university president authority symbol being so exposed, and no one else in the entire university community. Moreover, under what actual bases will students be allowed to re-enter the campus and classroom? Some even causal research will show that it will be dependent on compliance with federal vaccination protocol, Real ID submission, and registration (one reason the Patriot Act was extended in December).
This entire event otherwise reminds me of theologian and philosopher Martin Buber’s insightful thoughts in “I and Thou” (Ich und Du), which, may I share with the readers:
“Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire. Not all deceptions are palatable. Untruths are too easy to come by, too quickly exploded, too cheap and ephemeral to give lasting comfort. Mundus vult decipi; but there is a hierarchy of deceptions. Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat. On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish. Near the top of the ladder we encounter curious mixtures of untruth and truth that exert a lasting fascination on the intellectual community. What cannot, on the face of it, be wholly true, although it is plain that there is some truth in it, evokes more discussion and dispute, divergent exegeses and attempts at emendations than what has been stated very carefully, without exaggeration or one-sidedness. The Book of Proverbs is boring compared to the Sermon on the Mount.”
Regards.