Off Kilter Semester Start

 After Spring Break 2020.

Summer 2020.

Fall 2020.

Spring 2021.

Summer 2021.

Fall 2021.

Spring 2022.

Summer 2022.

Fall 2022.

Spring 2023.

We are now in our third year of teaching in a global pandemic. For most of us it is a surreal reality at this point. Most schools dropped mask mandates last spring when states did. Many schools never had vaccine mandates. A lot of schools stopped testing to return or posting information on dashboards with the mask mandates. Depending on where you are your faculty and staff may not be masking anymore either. Your university or college may have returned to just about all in-person events. It's "back to normal." 

Except I don't remember "normal" being 47, 328 daily cases, 498 daily deaths, both of which are most certainly an undercount as the US either never got data tracking systems up and running efficiently or abandoned them along with other mitigation measures. 1 in 5 people get some sort of Long Covid. And every time you get Covid you're running that risk. 

For the most part, these three years were not used to accomplish anything. Air quality was not improved in schools and public buildings. Healthcare and education were not reimagined to be better. Equity and access were not achieved.

Public K-12 schools are not sharing when students get sick, test positive. So whole generations of children are being infected again and again. School systems are not designed to constantly have a large number of teachers and students out for a week or more. Schools may have gone back to all in-person but almost no where does it resemble anything you'd recognize as school. The fall was full of horror stories of class after class losing teachers for weeks, three, four, classes put in a gym to watch movies, first monitored by a teacher, then an aide, then a janitor as there just was no one in the school.

Hospitals are overwhelmed. This many years in many people suffering from Long Covid have stopped seeking treatment after so long with no help. Treatment, doctors, availability of options for Long Covid are not readily available, not is just general information. 

The healthcare system which was already completely broken is now just kicking the can down the road. It takes three months to get a doctor's appointment. People go to urgent care or ERs to try and get help. If you stay home and try to treat symptoms there is no cold medicine, no ibruprofren, to self treat.

Yet you have to work to know any of this. It's not covered on the morning news programs. Not covered by newspapers. 

In year three there are very separate realities depending on how privileged or rich you are and the gap between them only seems to widen.

Each semester there have been different things as teachers, as professors, that we've had to adjust to. First we all worked for free to move all our classes online. Then we rearranged our classes for hybrid formats that included alternate days for attendance and a lot of supplemental materials online. By spring 2020 I know a lot of schools were back fully face to face. These last two years may have looked normal on paper but anyone in a classroom can tell you this is far from the truth.

Students are absent for weeks at a time. They are still juggling the move home, children home, working, schedules that they started during the pandemic. Last semester was the first time students openly talked in class about the PTSD they felt from the pandemic but this was obvious before they talked about it. 

We've kept moving forward but we've been leaving people behind.

This semester is worse and I worry that education, like all these other cascading failed systems, are not stopping to acknowledge any of this, so we're not even thinking of solutions. 

Teachers have talked about how students seem more attached to electronics, burying themselves in videos and texts. Phones have become woobies.

Students have a hard time working in class in groups, participating in discussions after years of a narrow, electronic, definition of what participation looks like.

Taking notes, reading, writing, completing assignments that are NOT about uploading and compliance, these are all skills students are struggling with.

The majority of my first year students this year spent almost all of high school during the pandemic. Online. Teachers out for long periods. Possibly them out for a long time. "Canned" lessons and assignments that were best option but not great options. 

In my opinion and experience, a takeaway is that many students have a single, narrow, definition of what learning looks like, what work looks like. And they struggle outside of this comfort zone.

But I have also noticed something similar to what I first saw when I started teaching online in 2010. Students seem to have a basic misunderstanding of how we (most of education) THINKS education should work. The example I always used was correspondance courses. That you were just given a packet, a list of things to complete, and once you finished it, in your own time, whenever you wanted, you sent it in, and were done. 

There are some students that do fine with this. They self-pace, they don't need instruction, they do not see a use for revisiting or revising work. Students who do fine with this model are usually white, privileged students. They have people at home to help fill the gaps. They only have to focus on school. They have internet and computers to help. But we're leaving the rest behind.

This semester for the first time I had a large numer of students who just told me they weren't going to be there the first couple of weeks. Who schedule work shifts during class. Who are juggling families, kids, work, other classes, and are making decisions about doing the reading (or not), doing the work (or not), attending (or not) based on a very complex set of metrics.

I don't say any of this as a "kids these days" "get off my lawn" way.

Rather, I bring all this up as a way of highlighting that for the first couple of years of the pandemic educators, schools, administration have all "pivoted" and "accommodated" and "adapted" by creating alternate assignments, flexible schedules, and changing/adapting policies. But it is not enough. It might have been enough if we'd upgraded air filtration, all had vaccine and booster mandates as requirements for admission, kept accurate dashboards of information, expanded our help, PSAs, resources, to the communities we serve. If we'd educated and kept educating our students, staff, faculty. If we'd listened to science instead of seeking comfort in hygiene theatre. If the global pandemic was a brief tragedy to endure these temporary moves probably would have been enough.

But we did not do any of those things. This is not going away. This and worse is our lived reality now.

So the question is, what do we do next?

I don't have the answers but I have some thoughts.

I think students need to be better advised. I think advisors need to not just randomly schedule classes. I think that there needs to be a conversation about your mental health, your anxiety, your stress level, and whether or not you can deal with 7 classes and 15 or 18 credits this semester. I think there needs to be a conversation about what those classes are, that a balance between swimming, and art, and heavy content classes needs to exist. I think advisors need to know if the student has a family at home, is juggling child care, a full time job, and schedule accordingly.

I think conversations need to be had early and often about what face to face, during the day, classes require. If the majority of your student population has not had consistent, face to face, instruction, then you need to teach them what this looks like. Emphasize what is important. Then train/support faculty to be able to teach the skills needed.

I think that universities and colleges needs to change or adapt their schedules for this. More night classes. More online classes. A lot of schools moved to a heavy online schedule, then just cut back. More once a week seminar classes. Weekend classes.

As a whole educational systems need to dump their ableist, racist, policing policies. No exceptions. No debates.

Faculty need to learn different ways to teach. They need to actually teach. They need exposure to methods and research that works, they need support to try it out, they need to feel like they can experiment until they find what works best for them and their students.

Campuses need to carve out time, take things off people's plates so that we can brainstorm and talk together about the issues we're having in the classroom, to talk about what our students need, and read, research, discuss, how we can help them.  Centers for Teaching and Learning and administration have to let go of old models of education. Some have made changes the last few years but they are not for the better. The neo-liberal university model which was already too prevalent in education has become the rotted foundation. Faculty don't reflect about the students in front of them, they get "micro-credentialed" by corporations and told it makes them a good teacher. Companies sell training videos and speakers who emphasize that we all just need to try a little harder, do a little more, and that will fix things.

Schools need to have honest conversations with the communities they serve about what their purpose is, how they can serve the greater good.

Class sizes need to be smaller. You need to hire more faculty. You need to make mental health not just an app or day but a core tenet of your campus life. You need counselors and therapy sessions that are readily available for all students, staff, and faculty. You need to have conversations about grief and loss and trauma. Technology needs to be freely available. Campuses and dorms need to have permanent quarantines (not send students home), Covid directors in student health, regular testing, information available. They need to education their communities on the latest science and back it up with booster workshops, practical help.

K-12 and higher education were already broken, fractured, deeply damaged before the pandemic. We collectively had a chance to remake it and chose not to. I don't know if education survives this. Our images of what school looks like may become nothing more than tales we tell people, with no resemblance to what things are like now. We're already seeing public schools dismantled, defunded at alarming rates for privatized options that are just excuses to teach hate. College enrollments are falling, and schools are closing. Some places may hold on longer than others depending on who supports them, how much money is in the bank. But it's a zero sum game ultimately.

IF we don't change. IF we don't stop. IF we don't rethink how and what we teach.

I honestly wouldn't make a bet either way at this point. One casualty of the pandemic for me was my faith in the collective good. But I'd love to be pleasantly surprised.