I think in my first ten years on campus I received exactly one formal notification from an administrative office about a student's mental health concerns. This semester I've had three. And even though only one of those three students had talked to me about her struggles, I've had more students weeping in my office than ever before. So much worry and sadness, so many tissues. The kids are not all right.
One of the spillover effects is that I have an unprecedented number of requests for opportunities to make up work. "I had an emergency," I am hearing from student after student. I've been flexible about Zoom attendance because I do not want students hauling themselves to class with a blossoming case of COVID, but it's messier to have both in-person and online students. I have a bunch of stray emails sitting in my inbox: here is my version of the in-class exercise, they say. They're never really the same thing as the in-class exercise, because they weren't in class -- they couldn't discuss anything with anybody. I suppose I ought to roll with it? I am doing a lot of rolling with it, it feels like.
Another wrinkle: I have never had this many students say, "I submitted my assignment and then afterward one of my friends told me I had done it wrong because I hadn't read the directions. But can you grade it anyway? Or can you give me another chance to do the assignment?" In normal circumstances I would say "nope!" with a clear conscience. You had ten weeks to read the directions! They're straightforward directions! But these are not normal circumstances.
Learning names has been a huge task for me this semester. I've posted before about my face recognition issues -- I'm not face-blind, just sort of face-myopic, but I have s-t-r-u-g-g-l-e-d to figure out who's who based solely on eyes/eyebrows/hair. I was feeling pleased with myself when I finally got all 43 of the names in my largest class matched up with the right faces. Some of them are tenuous matches. Today in office hours a student came by to review her last exam. I could have retrieved her name in the classroom, because she always sits in the same seat. But if she is not sitting in that seat? It's too much for my overloaded brain, apparently.
So I was feeling pleased, as I say, thinking I FINALLY had all the names down for the semester, at least when I was in the classroom. But my medium-sized class is giving me a some resurgent face-name trouble. There's a little cluster of students who look a lot like each other, based solely on eyes/eyebrows/hair, and I am not entirely sure that I will get them all sorted out before the semester ends. In recent classes I've been assigning them to work in different groups, moving them around the classroom, which means I can't rely on cues like "always sits next to the student whose name I definitely know."
I am battling some negative feelings about much of this-- I would rather know all of their names, I would rather be more caught up on grading than I currently am, I would rather have a clearer sense of how to balance rigor and flexibility. But you know, it's a weird semester. Sometimes all you can do is keep on slogging through it.
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