Coed-19

I was on my way to my Wednesday evening class when another instructor came into the associate faculty room. I stopped to greet her and she launched into a tirade.


“Well I hope you’re prepared to create an online class now.” She exclaimed, throwing her bag down on the desk. “Of course we’ve all got several class modalities to choose from.”


I was already a minute late, but I stopped just long enough to get the clarification. Spring break was being extended by a week so that we could prepare for the possibility remote instruction brough on by the Covid-19 outbreak—which of course, back in mid-March, seemed a ridiculous possibility.

Naturally, community college instructors complain about any such change to their schedule, even when it means an extra week off. We saw the week as an unnecessary infringement on our perfectly crafted schedules.


I was prepared for such changes and interruptions by years teaching overseas where classes are always subject to change. In other countries the heat cuts out, week-long storms flood the streets, kings die and classes must be cancelled, but in the US the only common unexpected break comes from the snow and only about half the country enjoys the possibility of this interruption.


I went to my class that evening and told my students that I’d have to cut the week of writing conferences I had planned; I was a little disappointed, but, as you can imagine, the students cheered at the news that they were going to have two weeks off and after thinking it over all day Thursday. I wasn’t so grieved at the news myself. I left campus with the general rush feeling confident about the loss of a week that was causing everyone else so much anxiety. Of course, restrictions were already being handed down in places like Seattle, but, not planning a trip there, I wasn’t too worried.


For spring break, my wife and I had planned a camping trip with our 16-month old daughter to Mendocino for a few days. We arrived on a clear Friday afternoon and left on a wet Saturday afternoon after the rain clouds moved in, our tent proved itself unworthy to weather any significant rainfall and our daughter decided that she wasn’t going to sleep in such a rude vessel and stayed awake at least half the night crying. I wasn’t upset about the unexpected end to our trip. I had a few days of paper grading to do, but then I’d have another week of a break and if nothing else I hoped to bike out to Patrick’s Point for one more night of camping before the end of the break.


Saturday morning, before we left town, we stopped into a café for some desperately needed coffee after our sleep deprived night. Back in civilization, I decided to check my email. It had only been a day, but the load of emails that had come in Friday evening and Saturday so overwhelmed me that I became one of those reprehensible guys you see seated across the table from a beautiful woman in a comfortable café on a drizzly Saturday morning, entirely oblivious to the potential of the moment around him to provide an even greater comfort that whatever the phone can furnish. You know what I mean. There’s this beautiful scene, steaming coffee, someone to share the table with, rain dripping down the windows and this guy, instead of languorously talking and letting the coffee steam bathe his face and feeling some real poetic quality happiness, is intent on his damn phone. I always imagined these callous bastards to be scrolling through their Facebook feeds. I never expected that they might be trying to digest reams of updates on potential school closures or trying to read through the lines of oblique but potentially startling news.


Shutting down for the rest of the semester? Was the administration really prepared to do such a thing? Weren’t they overreacting? Here I was in a beautiful café, ignoring my wife and my little girl. The place was full of contented people rustling newspapers, eating gigantic scones. Where was the panic? Where were the rubber gloves and masks? The hazmat suits that necessitated such an action as semester-long school closure? Everyone around me was perfectly relaxed. If they were battling thoughts of a pandemic, they were damn complacent about it. I stopped ignoring my wife long enough to tell her what I was reading. She was too busy wrangling our daughter away from other people’s precariously placed lattes to listen. “Oh?” Was all she said from across the café. ‘Yeah,’ I thought. ‘That’s all the consideration this deserves.’ I turned off the damn alarmist phone and we went back out into the rain. For all its tininess, Fort Bragg has a lovely library.


Back at home on Sunday, I was still getting messages. Word was expected Monday about the move to remote instruction. And with the first official day of spring break came the directive that obliterated the rest of the break. ‘Transition to remote instruction’. I stared at those words for a while, blinking in disbelief. There was no ‘until’ given. Already it seemed as if this was poised to continue into the distant future. I dragged the computer out to the shed and started working like a battered correspondent trying to get a dispatch on the situation in Abkhazia ready for the telex when the line opened. That is, I was working against the clock, to try to maintain my class, but the entire time I was assailed with questions. Would my students still attend (remote) classes? What tasks could be salvaged and which needed to be scrapped? What would lectures look like? Would another directive come down—the situation at this time was beginning to worsen in Italy, the news was becoming slightly hysterical—would this this work become invalidated? But with so much to do and learn about online classes, I put my head down, ignored these questions and set about modifying, recording and changing due dates.


For me, the real distraction was the sudden inundation of emails offering varied help with creating online classes—emails, I’ll point out as of April 4, I’m still receiving. As classes across the country went online, representatives from various publishers, educational institutions and colleagues began offering tools to make the transition easier. But this wasn’t the hospital and we weren’t nurses in need of masks which were simply to be put on. Each webinar, each new gadget that could be added to our learning management systems required hours of preparation. And as the emails came in thick and fast, people doing their best to support the struggling teachers, the sense inferiority began to set in. If I wasn’t using such and such an app would my class suffer? Were text discussions enough or did I need to augment them with video? What the hell was 5HP and what did I need it for? I’m a teacher, but for the next week and a half, I became a website designer, as I suppose was all must, eventually. A crash course in such things is fine. And my college did a pretty good job of providing one, but at some point, instructors need to be allowed to continue with their work without continual advice on how to improve. Education, being an imperfect science, is already quite ‘improvement’-haunted.  

Luckily, I was slightly familiar with using my online learning management system. For many of my colleagues who weren’t, this must’ve been a hell of a ride. Receiving mountains of incredibly piecemeal information and then having to translate it for their classes’ needs, figure it out for their operating systems and syllabi and then spend all that anxious time copying and pasting ‘shared secrets’ and generated URLs hoping the apps would work. It was like being asked to program some immense VCR and being handed a stack of operating manuals from all the models in existence, excepting, of course, the one you have before you: an immense gleaning of information and ad hoc application with a looming deadline.


When I emerged from the shed a few days before the end of the deadline, I was dusty and my eyes were sore from trying to keep track of countless tabs and various functions. But, I’d created something. I had a class ready to go and I resolved not to bother with it again until classes began.

Of course this resolution died quickly in the continuing waves of doubt that usually lapped over me in the middle of the night, prodding for possible leaks and, after some reflection, there were many. I lugged the computer back into the shed and spent the last weekend patching, click-and-dragging and worrying.


Now, keep in mind how incredibly lucky I am to have had this shed. I put in some 11-hour days out there. If I had been continually distracted say by the normal occurrences of a household, these 11-hour days very easily could’ve become entire weeks of work. If it were necessary for me to play with my daughter or communicate with my wife on any kind of regular basis, I would probably still be working away. Luckily they permitted my absenteeism, provided it was on a limited basis, but consider the difference in this situation between those who own a house with a rumpus room and a backyard (for the kids to play in) and a computer room with a door (that locks!) as opposed to those who rent studio apartments that they share with two kids. The cafés and libraries that might have once equalized these disparate communities are now closed and, as we move into shelter in place, some instructors and teachers will have a much easier time than others. The shed, after all, wasn’t mine. I gave my landlord $60 bucks to use it for a week and now I count myself lucky to have a laundry room to work from, one albeit that doesn’t have a door that latches, let alone locks. So I am grading papers and listening to my daughter crash around in the kitchen while my wife—who’s already doing three or four things at once brought on, no doubt but my recent absenteeism—tries to keep her from ripping her books up or getting into the diaper pail…again.


In the evenings, before bed, often because I’ve had too much coffee and not gotten enough exercise to sleep, I’ve had some phone conversations that have revealed some people are bored or don’t know what to do with themselves now that everything is closed. They talk of reading War and Peace. They talk of finally getting down to writing that novel. I try to understand this reality, but then my computer dings. In the ten minutes I’ve been on the phone, I’ve received 5 questions from students, missed another Zoom meeting and my inbox has reached capacity with the latest batch of offers to help with webinars that are made to sound like something I would be remiss as an educator to not attend. Before I can consider any of this my daughter comes in waving Hop on Pop around with a ‘there you are!’ look on her face and I hear snores issuing from the living room, most likely from my wife who’s been trying to put the little girl to bed for the last hour. “I gotta’ go,” I tell my bored friend.


Finally, there is the inexhaustible topic of disappearing students, something that no amount of trainings or apps will correct. No matter how elaborate or interesting or easy we make our classes, the reality is that about 1/3 of students have ghosted their instructors and classmates for what are probably very valid reasons. Instructors have taken unprecedented approaches and begun digging through course information to find alternate emails and phone numbers for these students. After sending out 3 or 4 waves of emails with ‘Please Respond’ as the subject, I had to resort to making phone calls. I have now made contact with most of my students, but last night, between deleting emails and changing diapers, I managed to glean from my friend who teaches jr. high that he’s only heard from about 20% of his class. He’s resorted to all the efforts I’ve listed above, but there are going to be students that, for whatever reason will now disappear. Usually over the course of a semester, there are one or two. This year we’re going to have a lot more. Who knows maybe they don’t have sheds they can work from either and, once again we’re back to the revolutionary idea that teachers and students struggle with the same issues. One side struggles in designing the course, the other in consuming it, but the work required is really very similar, especially now that we’re all doing it amidst the same distractions.


With any luck, everyone else has a family member as captivating as my daughter. While I might not get as much done as I’d like, I’m glad to be spending more time with her and, in a way, I feel fortunate that this is happening now rather than, say, when she’s 15. For all the 15-year-olds and their parents, whether or not they are instructors in a community college, I can only say ‘good luck’ with this. I hope you had the foresight to build a shed (or partition off part of a studio apartment) before this happened.