Thread by @studentactivism

People were asking me why I'm skeptical that I'll be back in the classroom before 2022. This is why.

https://twitter.com/NicholasFerroni/status/1385719163029803014

My college has one lecture hall. On the entire campus. Most classrooms seat about 30 comfortably in non-covid times, 40 if you push it. No way to do social distancing for in-class instruction without folding in Zoom for the majority of students.

And we're a commuter campus, which means no dorms. At all. So everyone's going back to families, kids, parents, housemates, etc. And most students AND faculty are arriving on public transportation.

So there's no bubble, no way to create a campus-wide pod, no way to keep any outbreaks from immediately spreading into the community. AND nobody can come back to in-person unless they're comfortable taking the bus or subway at specific hours, regularly.

And of course as an urban community college, we've got a student body that's way more varied along axes of age and health than a traditional residential four-year college (though those are far less cookie-cutter than they used to be, too).

AND when a student drops out of a CUNY community college, that usually means they're leaving higher ed behind, probably for a long time. So we've got a moral imperative to make sure we don't lose anyone we have the ability to keep.

So all of that means we can't just turn on a dime and return to in-person instruction. Which brings us back to the first tweet in the thread.

Thirteen months in, I'm pretty good at teaching on Zoom. I have a workspace set up, I'm mostly good at linking my tablet to my computer and my pencil to my tablet so I've got a virtual whiteboard. I've got a system for class discussion and one for taking attendance. And so on.

But if I go back into the classroom, I need to rebuild all that pretty much from the ground up. Need to learn how to use the camera, the computer, the software I'm provided. Need to figure out how to deal with teaching in two classrooms—one in-person, one virtual—simultaneously.

And if anything crashes, students bail on that day's class. And if it crashes regularly, or glitches in ways profs don't know how to fix, students bail on the course.

And it's not like I can spend twenty hours over the course of a week beta testing in my pajamas in my living room. And it's not like my college has unlimited IT staff on call at all times. And it's not like all my colleagues are tech savvy.

As Daniel notes, the current setup is really really rough on students (and on profs, too). So the desire to get back into the classroom is high.

https://twitter.com/gilmored85/status/1386353018191425538

But I'm hearing anecdotally that fall in-person classes just aren't seeing a registration rush right now—students are skeptical, and worried. And with good reason.

I'm not plugged into the planning for the fall semester, so I'm mostly getting secondhand info on how things are going. But I don't envy the people who are trying to put things together.

It's a much harder problem at institutions like mine than it is at elite colleges, and that's before you even start talking about resource disparities.

My gut tells me that I'm going to be all online in fall 2021, and back in the classroom for in-person instruction in fall 2022, maybe teaching one remote class.

Spring 2022? I have no idea. Honestly. I just don't have a clue.

Which means that it'll likely be something like two years from the day I walked out of the classroom until the day I walk back in. Maybe more. It's hard to wrap my brain around it.

A couple of folks have asked why we can't just require vaccination and go back without social distancing, and yeah, that's something that could work for some students and faculty, but it's not a one-size-fits-all solution.

First of all, there's the question of what you do with students who won't or can't get vaccinated. It's a very different thing for an elite private to say "come back when you've gotten the shot" than it is for a community college.

Second, we just don't know how many unvaxxed people there will be in our student population in August. What that number looks like has a huge effect on planning, and we just don't know what it's going to be.

Third, there's the problem of figuring out what to do if students (and faculty and staff) want to stay remote even after they get the shot. Again, we're only guessing what those numbers will look like, but we have to be planning now.

Fourth, there's the question of how to incorporate a return to the classroom into students' lives, logistically. I have students logging into my classes from work break rooms, from the street, with kids on their laps. Lots of classes are completely asynchronous.

Even if 100% of students, faculty, and staff were vaxxed by June 1, the logistics of a fully in-person fall semester would be daunting.

And again, I want to underscore that I have basically no inside info on this. There may be a vax mandate at CUNY for in-person instruction in the fall. Some, even many, CUNY campuses may go back to mostly face-to-face. I'm not making predictions, and emphatically not systemwide.

I think this is big at a lot of non-selective, non-residential colleges. We just don't know how many of our students, even vaxxed ones, will be willing to sit in crowded classrooms in the fall.

https://twitter.com/ElinWaring/status/1386394515888500737

And if you can do hybrid, you can finesse that issue, and adapt as the semester unfolds. But if hybrid isn't an option at the scale of an entire campus—and at a lot of urban campuses I don't think it is—then you have to pick one or the other for each class: remote, or in-person.

And the impression I get is that at a lot of institutions, if that’s the question, the answer is largely going to be remote.

Just one addendum here: I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the extent to which residential colleges are factoring uncertainty about the course of the epidemic into their fall planning.

People see elite colleges rolling out face-to-face plans for the fall, and think that means the schools are assuming there won't be any curveballs. It doesn't. It means they think curveballs are unlikely AND MANAGEABLE.