By Rawpixel.com (Pexel)

BY AARON BARLOW

I am keeping technological interfaces with students to a bare minimum out of compassion and to assist learning. My students have enough to deal with right now; they don’t need additional troubles from platforms they don’t know and technologies they may not be able to access. They are New York City residents at the center of disruption and, now, are beginning to experience COVID-19 illness and death on a personal level.

Though I know that this semester is a universal disaster on a ‘content’ level, I want to keep mt students’ education going. After all, I am a teacher and my professional focus is on those I shepherd. That does not stop in a time of crisis. I understand the value of order and consistency so want to keep my courses going. Yet I also recognize the need for flexibility so am changing the focus of each of my classes and revising my expectations. Learning can occur even when it’s not going to plan.

Like many of us, I began preparing for the classroom shutdown more than a week before it began on my campus. I was able to alert my students to some of the changes they could expect. What I could not do was explain the emotional toll that the isolation, illness and death we are now experiencing was going to exact. I knew that my expectations of the students were going to have to change if I expected any education to continue, but I did not know how things would pan out. Still don’t.

Online systems, for all that they try to be otherwise, are autocratic by structure. In addition, decisions about the conversion to online teaching had to be made without consultation with students. Even those of us who saw this coming and who did discuss it with our students in the classroom had to make unilateral decisions. I couldn’t have asked my students whether or not they wanted synchronous or asynchronous instruction, though we did discuss the distinction, because there wasn’t time even for me, with what turned out to be more than a week’s grace, to bring my students up to speed on the implications of the difference. I also had to go with what I know, for I didn’t want to take time from students so I could learn to manipulate platforms that, like Blackboard, I haven’t used for years. My determination to keep things as simple as possible, technologically, meant that I had to make decisions without involving students. I chose to use our in-house WordPress-driven platform but quickly decided to keep it primarily as a clearinghouse, a locus for information, not action. For the latter, I am relying on texting between students on their smartphones and on email, things they already do/use extensively, keeping the changes as simple for the students as possible.

And as accessible. They all have smartphones, I discovered, and the WordPress site is easily accessible through them. They had already been working with each other through texts and we are continuing that. Not all of them have access to computers or Wi-Fi (something my system, CUNY, is trying to rectify), but they are all willing to continue even if just through their phones, if necessary, recognizing the situation is far from ideal.

Even so, there have been problems for some of them, especially those who were not in class when we set things up. Though my first reaction is always to grumble at them, asking why they missed the two classes where we talked about this, I have restrained myself and have worked with them to get them up to speed. There is no point in being punitive or even annoyed right now.

I have restrained my impatience for all of the obvious reasons of the crisis and am extending that to grading. As we begin to experience illness and death from COVID-19 around us, our reactions are as unpredictable as they are myriad. Yesterday, a man whose children I know died and a number of other friends and acquaintances are ill, some still waiting for the results of tests, others knowing it is COVID-19. My students are in exactly the same position—and it is going to get worse for all of us. This makes it difficult to attend to school, though focus on academics can also help ease the stress of the lockdown and of our communal inability to assist those who are ill.

If I am going to be a successful teacher through this pandemic, I have to keep a number of things in mind. First, some of my students are going to get sick and members of their families or personal networks (at least) are going to die. Even if the mortality rate is below 1%, it will be above .5%, meaning that someone each of us knows, and probably more, will fall. Even if only 15% of those who contact the disease will need hospitalization and those who get sick at all is 40% (a low estimate), people we familiar with are certainly going to be among those needing intensive-care beds. The start of this is already putting great emotional strain on my students. And it will get worse as the number of cases continues to spike. At the time I write, we are up to over 1300 dead in the United States after reaching 1000 just 24 hours ago.

If my students are going to continue to learn, I have to ensure two things. First, that they can rely on me to react to them with compassion and so remain open to expressing to me the problems they may be having in meeting their school obligations. Second, that my students know that my expectations of them are reasonable and can be changed in light of the evolving situation, that I am not going to hold them to standards that are no longer possible to meet.

The ‘outcome’ I want for my students right now, beyond health and a return to economic security (if they had that in the first place), is simply an increased dedication to the process of learning along with a growing understanding of the unsettling situation around them. In particular, I hope that I am assisting them in developing the skills with language that can help them negotiate their own experiences in a time of personal and general crisis. Along with everything else, I am keeping my evaluations simple, pointing things out and guiding but keeping judgment to a minimum. I know I will have to submit grades at the end of semester (the wheels of the bureaucracy keep on turning) but those grades are going to be based on effort, with the understanding that external factors are going to affect even that.

I hope my students can trust that this will be the case. After all, even when we were in the classroom, I worked hard on just that, on developing student confidence in me.

I hope it pays off.