The new normal?
There’s this three week, 21 days magic mark when a habit is supposed to have become established. Supposed to be because it turns out it’s a whole lot more complicated. That’s a shame, because today marks the end of the first three weeks of teaching from home, or to put it more accurately: being home and trying to teach.
The other problem with stating that I’ve now reached the new normal is that the situation keeps evolving: my county, in fact: my town in Pennsylvania is not doing too well, and it’s not my fault because I am staying at home, other than a walk or a run to keep me “fighting fit” as a former coach would probably call it. I know I can run off the start of a common cold with a good sweaty interval run. I doubt it will work on this novel virus, but exercise is good for you in other ways. My last trip to the store was Tuesday (30 March); I had to go into the office for some visa-related paperwork last Thursday. That’s it. And yet the cases in the Lehigh Valley keep increasing. So I’m mentally preparing for the moment when I notice I’ve caught it, or maybe more accurately, it caught me, despite my best precautions. That’s exhausting.
What’s also exhausting is that this constantly evolving new normal sucks from the point of view of us educators. Every single one of my colleagues I have spoken to agrees that it take so.much.more.time. We’re all exhausted by now, and we’re only starting week 12 of 15. Even if that final week is not introducing new content, there is a ton of feedback to be given on student projects or grading for those who give tests, so we’re not done yet. And I write this assuming that we’ll be healthy as we get to Week 15 and Finals week. That’s assuming a lot, at the moment, based on the current developments in Lehigh county.
So what makes the course prep and teaching so much more intensive? In my case, for a course I was running pretty much the same as I was last year, it now means I need to batch texts together in different ways. We lost the better part of three sessions to simply not having class, or discussing the possibility of and then the actual preparation for an emergency switch to remote. I also restructured the course so as not to overburden students. (Why I made that decision is a conversation for a future post). Because I provide students with choices of texts or sets of texts, I try to find enough common ground between the sets, so they can engage in “cross-pollination” on a single discussion board. I also figure out that the texts that fall by the wayside can serve as an optional extra. I don’t know how many students read these now, but I have seen them pop up during the “normal” semester in Primary Source Analyses, and it makes me happy to know that students go grazing outside of the meadow.
So instead of just looking at last year’s course schedule, I need to sit down and look through the texts, put them together so it looks like a manageable load, and more or less equal between the options, and only then can I start with the usual processing (this year: adding OCR, which takes a bit of time.) Multiply that by three, and you can see why we’re not just taking our courses online. All of us are thinking about the fundamentals we try to save for every course, and how our materials need to be adjusted. For me, the reason is simple: the last thing I want to do is create more stress for the students. There is a pandemic out there doing a perfect job of that already.