And I’m done with this quarantine, too!
I said yesterday that I’m more or less done with the semester, even if it is not yet done with me. We’re now 28 days into this (necessary!) rigmarole of “social distancing” (more aptly called “physical distancing”), and similarly: I’m done with this too, but it is not yet done with us, is it?
I spent the day looking through student projects, and went hunting down texts and possible sources, and giving feedback on how to turn something vague into something viable. I get to do more of that tomorrow. This is what I love doing, so I have to find ways to do more of this next semester: the hunt for knowledge never gets old, and like a big cat teaching the cubs how to hunt, teaching this stuff never gets old either!
(I can’t insert a picture of the nice big cats I have in mind here, due to copyright, but do yourself a favour and have a look at this gallery on my uncle’s photosite, where you will find awesome big cat portraits!)
As I am thinking beyond the current semester, I get itchy. I want to know if we will be able to start the semester as we always do, with in-person instruction. After all, that is what education at a small liberal arts college is all about. At the moment, no decision has been made. I hope we all keep doing well with the physical distancing, finally hammer that curve, and have a fair chance at a regular start in September.
I’m thinking about what I learned so far from this experience in emergency remote teaching and learning. The discussion posts have turned out to be really a strong point: I definitely hear more student voices than I did in the classroom. Some students indicated they like that they have more time to reflect and digest before they respond to a fellow student; in class, the conversation is often at that point already in a different galaxy. But I also want to balance the workload, so perhaps the weekly reflection will have to go? Or adjust frequencies?
I probably can do with less content in the in-person setting, and make more space for exploration and “lab”-style experiments and discovery. Previously I pondered that one of my colleagues in the sciences has the advantage that nobody bats an eyelid when he adds a “lab” section to a course, even if they’re not dissecting frogs or setting things on fire (what else does one do in a lab?). He uses the lab time for students to work on their digital projects. But as a humanities teacher, that’s a harder sell. Maybe the solution was staring me in the face all the time: less synchronous instruction, and instead some asynchronous system of “modules” or “pods”, in which students craft their own adventure through the history of X, and create small or large projects of their own choice to demonstrate their learning and progress. Then, by the middle of the semester, they can be in a position to teach each other, with me just fluttering around like a busy bumblebee trying to create some pollination across those pods or modules. Setting up such a system would require a TON of preparation; I am not sure I can do that easily for every course.
And let’s face it: the real problem we will deal with when we start teaching in the Fall has nothing to do with the format of instruction, whether it is in our classrooms or remotely again, or a hybrid of some sort. The elephant in the room is the sheer amount of trauma that we will collectively carry with us at that point. Just based on statistics and our proximity to New York, there is a high likelihood that we or somebody close to use has had the virus, and possibly suffered tremendously physically. We may have lost loved ones. We all have experienced the trauma of being uprooted, of having to take extraordinary precautions not to get ill (grocery shopping is exhausting), of trying to fathom the gap between the narrative of living in the richest country on earth and the reality that it is unable to protect the people who live here (and I don’t do politics online so this is as far as I’ll go). How do we move forward from this?
Right before the pandemic hit the US, I listened to a podcast from Tara Brach. She interviews the psychiatrist Jim Gordon about his latest book, and his work with victims of trauma – including collective trauma like natural disasters, and war. Dr. Gordon is the founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, and what he has to share is almost too good to be true: we all have the capacity and the tools to help heal deep trauma, and you can do it by just applying the techniques that he shares in this book. I’m currently working my way through it, and it’s staggering how simple the techniques are, yet the results are there. I’m not sure if or how I will be able to incorporate these, or how students will react. But when we start to plan for next Fall semester, we have to address the issue of trauma, or it will come and address us. And this is one I’d rather fight at a time and place I choose, if I can help it.