If I were a superstitious person I might think my happy blog post from last night had caused the email I got today, in which the Dean of Students office let me know that one of my students has COVID without saying "your student has COVID."
If I were a grumpy person I might grouse about it because this particular person sat in class and coughed up a storm both days this week -- mostly masked, but only mostly.
If I were a crotchety person I might mutter a little about the whole water bottle thing. It hasn't been that long since students drank water between classes, not during them. We did not take water bottles to class with us when I was an undergrad, but these days they are ubiquitous, and they occasion a lot of mask breaks. This idea that human beings shouldn't go an hour in a climate-controlled building without a beverage is a recent one.
If I were an irritable person I might complain about my unwarranted optimism. I thought to myself, "Surely with a cough like that she has been tested for COVID already. Surely she would not take a cough like that out in public in the middle of a pandemic unless she knew she was not going to be spreading COVID to the people sitting near her."
But! instead! I am trying to be a grateful person.
A) Grateful, so grateful, for the vaccines and for a high proportion of vaccinated students and staff.
B) Grateful for a campus mask mandate that seems likely to result in the containment of most of those virus-laden respiratory particles.
C) Grateful for low numbers of new cases on campus this fall (this one is probably closely related to items A and B above).
D) Grateful for good health, good luck (so far, at any rate!), and a good job.
...and also-- still a bit crabby about the whole thing. I really hope the students sitting around her were all vaccinated.
The administration has told us that we are expected to ignore students coughing in class. This makes sense. We can't say "have you been tested for COVID?" because that would be invasive and students' medical decisions are not their professors' business. But the assumption that students will say to themselves "I should get this cough checked out" turns out to be a faulty one. I guess we'll see how it turns out.
Recent Comments