Really interesting with the 17-year-old just now about how one of the teachers at her school is handling online learning. (Quick thread.)
This teacher is requiring that all students have audio and video on at all times in video classes, and INCREASING the weight given to class participation in the course grade. My kid: "I'll be fine, but this is ridiculous."
The teacher's attitude is that he doesn't want STEM students to fall behind in basics for college, but as my kid notes, every direct-from-high-school student matriculating in 2020 and 2021 is going to have had a lost semester because of this virus. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
She understands what he doesn't: That what's happening right now is altering the life trajectory of every adolescent who is living through it, in ways that we're only just beginning to grope toward understanding.
If you're a teacher right now, your first responsibility is to your students. Not to your discipline, not to your syllabus, and certainly not to some fantasy vision of a fall 2020 return to normalcy that you're carrying around in your head.
From a reply from a locked account, lightly paraphrased: "People are freaking out about kids falling behind. Falling behind *who*?"
You can't teach the way you'd intended to teach right now, and you can't move in the direction of what you'd intended by becoming more rigid and punitive and demanding.
Whatever you're going to salvage out of this semester is going to be salvaged by being human, by acknowledging and foregrounding what we're living through, by incorporating that understanding into our work with our students.
And if any teacher—particularly college teachers, but anyone, really—would like to chat about how to manage all this stuff, my DMs, as always, are open.
Watching Jon Mulaney. Apt. "I don’t know. I know you told me. But I have had a very long day. I am very small. And I have no money. So you can imagine the kind of stress that I am under."
Also Mulaney, also apt: "What is college? Stop going until we figure it out."
