Okay, friends, I have my first unit of material ready to roll out on Monday morning. I had been fretting a bit about writing reasonable quizzes for the online segment of my undergrad class. Here, I feel that Boromir would sympathize:
Shoutout to my textbook publisher, though; my sales rep called me back in minutes flat and sent me a link to their test bank materials immediately after our conversation on Thursday afternoon. I've never used their questions before and I only wound up using two of them as written, but the ideas about framing and difficulty level were helpful.
We are so lucky, so so lucky, to have portable jobs. I am trying to keep that at the forefront of my mind: it doesn't matter very much that I dislike teaching online. I can do that for the good of my students and my community no matter how much I dislike it.
I am mostly planning to teach asynchronously, meaning that I've pushed to get everything for the rest of March all ready to roll so the students can work through it at their own pace. I hope this will be easier for students from rural areas and students with money concerns, who may have dicey internet and thus have trouble attending Zoom lectures or watching a lot of video. Let's all hope they like it, my friends, because it's been a pain. (Oh, wait, I wasn't going to complain. I am so lucky, so so lucky, to have a portable job. I know that.)
I went into the office this afternoon, my last trip there for at least a few weeks, to bring home my plants and my big box of washi tape. In my drafts folder I have a post from last month about my love of washi tape. I wonder if it's too fluffy for these dark days or if it would be a pleasant diversion. Maybe I'll just post it and you can tell me.
Do you want some links I found interesting and at least mildly encouraging? This one is an interview with an epidemiologist who is like a human billboard for Why We Need Epidemiology. He describes himself as a scientist and a person of faith, and I found his perspective helpful and hopeful. Was it...just two days ago that they released the Imperial College report, saying we might have to live like this for 18 months? (I am losing track of time. It's hard to believe that 8 days ago I felt overly cautious canceling my trip to Chicago.) Anyway, I haven't read the Imperial College report because I've been trying to move a class online in a week, but as I understand it the authors focused exclusively on non-pharmacological interventions: IF the virus continues to kill people at this rate (apparently mutations tend to get less lethal, and this virus is constantly mutating) and IF we don't figure out effective medical treatments (but there are already some encouraging developments, so I'm not going to subscribe to that flavor of pessimism), then we're looking at 18 months of this. BUT! Tomas Pueyo, that guy who wrote one of the widely linked ACT NOW pieces earlier in this mess, posted a follow-up saying he thinks we can be much more optimistic than that. Are his assumptions sound? I do not know. Do I need a little optimism on this particular Friday. Yes indeed, I do.
Today Joe learned that his boarding school won't re-open this year -- his senior year. He has really loved it there and he had no idea a week ago that he was leaving permanently. So that's a big bummer. Alex and a group of friends with portable jobs all agreed to leave NYC together. They rented an AirBnB way the heck upstate and took their laptops and a big pile of board games. I found out tonight that it's a two-month rental. Good planning there, I have to say. The news out of NYC is sobering. The remaining six of us are hunkered down, trying to figure out exactly how hunkered down to be (going to the grocery store is now my husband's favorite thing). The toilet paper stock is dwindling but we'll figure something out.
Okay! I am going to bed. Hang in there, everybody. Tell me how you're doing when you get the chance.
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