Tag: Coronavirus Semester

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Teaching in Quarantine, Part 4 of ?

This post is a lightly edited version of a Twitter thread I wrote up earlier in a fit of pique over something I read in the New York Times. The author of the piece seems to think she has solved online education while managing to disparage faculty, ignore the realities of student body size and adjunctification at many institutions, overlook the temporary nature of the current situation, and spin out a very facile discussion  about the cost and value of college instruction. Hence the pique. All the same, I think I managed to address some misconceptions that I know go beyond just the author of the piece, so I didn’t want my reaction to get lost in the ether of my Twitter feed. The original piece can be found by clicking here, and my walk-through is below: 

An actual screen cap of college classes taught on Zoom.

“No one wants to pay $30,000 per semester for what they’ve been getting.”

“What they’ve been getting” was triage. Faculty had very little notice that we would be going online this semester (36 hours in my case).

“What they’ve been getting” is not what they will be getting in the fall because my colleagues and I are working dozens of hours above and beyond the work we normally do during the summer (and please note that most US college faculty are paid nine-month salaries, not twelve-month ones, but would never succeed in our professions if we didn’t work all year) to develop born-digital courses that will work. This extra work involves reading up on online education, taking webinars about how to use the technology available at our institution, participating in town halls on best practices for online education, making readings available digitally (sometimes with our camera phones because we can’t get into our offices to use scanners), and developing workarounds for the equity issues that crop up when our students have vastly different access to technology because of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. And again, this is on top of the work we regularly do in the summer, when we are not paid: In my case, that’s writing an academic book, translating a popular book from Spanish, drawing up plans for the trade book I want to write, and finishing three articles.

In the spring we were working in emergency conditions; in the fall conditions will be sub-optimal (because what deadly pandemic isn’t?) but we will have planned for and adapted to them.

“A survey of college students in the spring found that about 75 percent were disappointed with the online learning experience during the lockdown.”

Trust me, your (children’s) professors were, too. That’s why we’re scrambling now.

“I’ve learned that my family gets the best bang for our buck when our daughter engages directly with her professors, her classmates and the material.”

The current situation is, for sure, emphasizing a number of existing philosophical questions about what college education is, what it’s for, what it costs, and what it’s worth.

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Teaching in Quarantine, Part 3 of ?

It’s not really clear how my institution is going to proceed for the fall semester and nor is it clear that I’ll be teaching in the fall. (One of the options that has been floated is to treat AY 20-21 as if it has three semesters rather than two semester plus a summer session, with faculty teaching in two of three; I volunteered to teach in the summer instead of the fall if we go that route.) But of course the possibilities for online instruction are at least simmering on my mental back burner and proceeding at a rolling boil on #pedagogytwitter.

One of the recent controversies has been over whether it is permissible to require students to turn on their cameras in Zoom seminar or whether that’s an invasion of privacy. Having taught my lecture class this semester to a whole screen full of blank boxes, I am definitely going to require that cameras be on. I can’t imagine an entire semester in which I don’t have the visual cues to tell tell how my teaching is landing, whether students are with me, or whether they understand what’s going on — especially when it’s a new group of students I won’t have at least had some face-time with at the beginning of the term.  For seminars, there’s no way to even try to build rapport among the students if they only know each other as small gray rectangles . And in terms of accessibility, cameras-off is a challenge for students who read lips; I had a lip-reading student this semester and almost every time a student asked a question, I had to stop and remind them to put on their camera because even though I made a general announcement at the start of online instruction, it didn’t seem to stick. I understand that some students might not want other people to see their homes, be it for self-consciousness about socio-economic class, general concern for privacy, or any other number of reasons.

So in my syllabus language that requires cameras to be on, I’m going to explicitly state that they can use a background if they have privacy concerns relating to their classmates or me seeing into their homes. And I’m going to feature it, both so that students with privacy concerns don’t feel singled out and to make instructional use of the tools available. I haven’t quite worked out the details, but I’m planning to make an extra credit assignment to choose a background that somehow relates to the week’s reading or theme and keep a short record of the rationale for each choice. I hope it’ll be a way for students to engage while making the most of a sub-optimal situation. 

I taught from the Zoom Mosque of Córdoba for one class session this semester.
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Teaching in Quarantine, Part 2 of ?

I finished teaching this week; I may reflect more on remote instruction over the summer as I start preparing for the fall semester, but for now I need some distance and time to recover from a semester that had already shaped up as one of the most difficult I’ve had even before the global health crisis took hold. And for the time being, I’m not doing any planning for the fall because we don’t really know what it’s going to look like. But I am really worried.

We have gotten a few emails from the administration with contradicting messages about plans for fall instruction, ranging from proceeding as normal to being able to opt out of teaching in the fall and teaching regular courses next summer instead. It makes sense that there aren’t concrete plans yet because there is so little that is known about COVID-19 still and it’s so unclear what will happen in terms of disease spread as states and cities lift lockdown orders.

I’m in the age group that’s seeing this charming consequence of the disease. I’m really scared of getting sick once campus becomes more densely populated in the fall.

The most recent email was for faculty teaching in the core curriculum, suggesting that one option might be to split lectures (typically 80-120 students) in half, with half the students attending each lecture in person and half by video to leave enough room in lecture halls for appropriate social distancing; the groups would alternate so that every student could attend lecture in person once a week. 

That seems plausible on paper but it doesn’t seem to take into account any of the out-of-classroom factors. The weather has been beautiful for most of this week. It was eighty degrees and sunny over the weekend and I stayed indoors the whole time because there were too many people outside to be able to keep a distance. Even today, when the temperature was much lower, there were loads of people gathering in Washington Square Park, effectively the heart of campus, riding bikes and skateboards, running, and doing other activities and without masks or sufficient space between them. I worry that mitigation strategies like keeping classrooms half full won’t be sufficient when thousands of students return — even if a smaller than usual number return — and are going to parties, lining to get up into buildings, walking down the narrow streets of campus and the Village, and hanging out in the park. 

This is worry from a place of lacking information. But I’m not sure that the information exists to be able to make the right decisions, not yet anyway. But what I do hope is that the people who are charged with making those decisions take a walk through the campus and the neighborhood on a nice day this spring or summer and think about where all the additional bodies are going to go.

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Pozo Amargo, 2020

I used to have this friend. For a lot of reasons we grew apart. Ultimately, it was one of those grad school friendships that didn’t survive one and then both of us no longer being in graduate school. I might have tried to hang on longer if I hadn’t felt like I had taken on the role of being the friendly local Jewess whose very being could debunk the kinds of myths believed by people who grow up in parts of the world and the country where they might not have ever met any Jews, and if I hadn’t felt like I was failing at it. She’s the sort of person who thinks she can identify Jews — strangers, classmates, faculty —  by the size of our noses or who will start out an anecdote by mentioning that one of the people involved “is Jewish — no offense” as if it were an insult. 

There are other reasons for it, too, but we’re not in touch anymore; and that’s entirely on me. I don’t wish her ill. I hope she’s doing well, whatever well means to her; and I do occasionally look at her social media to see if that’s the case. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a Jewish journalist posting a photo of a line of men in coats and streimels and black hats waiting to buy suits for Passover; the journalist commented that he found this phenomenon infuriating.

My former friend replied to him:

(Guys, look, I know this is searchable, but I’ve anonymized it because as much as this hurt is personal, this is a much wider problem. Don’t go be an arse to someone I used to care about on social media, please.)

I’m teaching an introductory lecture course on medieval Spain this semester as part of NYU’s core curriculum, and we are nearing the lecture in which I will discuss the fourteenth-century legends and the rhetoric that grew up around Jews as unique and malicious vectors of the plague, legends and rhetoric that have persisted until today. It’s less flashy than the neo-Nazis who march with tiki torches, afraid that Jews will “replace” them, but it’s still an anti-Jewish myth that has persisted — in forms that change over time, of course — since the Middle Ages.

Let’s start with some statistics. The measles outbreak in Marin County, CA, was the result of a huge percentage of parents refusing to vaccinate their children for non-religious philosophical reasons. The United States was within days of no longer being considered a country where measles is eradicated; we’re not a big enough or spread out enough part of the population at large for that to have happened if measles were a Jewish problem. The bottom line is that yes, there are people in Jewish communities who are wrong on public health issues in ways that perpetuate harm. But there are also people in non-Jewish communities who are wrong on public health issues in ways that perpetuate harm. Thinking that you know better than physicians and epidemiologists or that you don’t have to pay attention to the wider world, whatever the foundation of those beliefs, is not an inherently Jewish trait. People are people in both the wonderful and the deeply stupid ways they engage with the world; but people tend to highlight it and act on it when it’s Jews in the wrong.

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Teaching in Quarantine, Part 1 of ?

I’m planning to do my coronavirus semester posting here rather than on FB, even though the latter is the more usual space for academic discussion. (Although maybe there’s a chance that the current crisis will breathe some life back into the academic blogging community?) This feels like a singular moment, and so I don’t want my posts to disappear down into the bowels of the FB juggernaut once this is over. So: 

I’m teaching a lecture course in NYU’s core curriculum this semester: Cultures and Contexts: Muslim Spain. I have 45 students (which is on the small end of this kind of course, which typically enroll 60-120, although spring enrollments are often smaller) who, as of last week, have been scattered to the four corners of the planet. 

I’ve adapted my course (as well as my upper division seminar) to accommodate the new situation, which has students in many time zones and with new family and work responsibilities; but also, in honestly, I was interested in adapting the course in such a way as to allow myself to maximize my writing time for the rest of the semester. (The first half of this semester wasn’t as productive as I would have liked, both because of an early-morning teaching schedule that wasn’t great for my night owl self’s circadian rhythm and because of family and student-related challenges that were taking up a lot of of headspace.)

I had my students fill out a short questionnaire to make sure that they would all be able to attend the adapted lectures and discussion sections. The final question was: “Are there any particular challenges you are facing as a result of the coronavirus situation that you would like your professor and TA to be aware of?” 

I have multiple students returning home to China, facing a two-week quarantine upon arrival in-country, in which they have no guarantee of internet access. I responded to the first student who flagged that situation in their questionnaire and asked what to do to keep up as follows:

The student responded and asked whether I could just record my lectures instead so that they could watch them once they’re out of quarantine.

So here’s my question: Do I have to record my lectures? I’m super uncomfortable with it. Because these are lectures from notes given in a fluid situation that I don’t really control rather than prepared, read papers given in a more staid conference context, I’m worried that if I say something really stupid or misspeak or make a mistake, that it’ll be out there on the internet forever. But given the current situation, do I just need to get over myself and record the lectures?