Pandemic projects
Shelter in place = a new pace
Canceling most face-to-face engagements and moving the remainder online does change the pace of things. Suddenly, we find ourselves taking more walks as a family, playing more games (right now, Yahtzee is our favorite, and it's actually quite raucous), and reading aloud. We're reading The Hobbit together. We did that once before, a long time ago, reading The Hobbit and the entire Fellowship of the Ring, when Rose was just old enough to cry that the books were over but none of the kids were old enough for their music and sports schedules to overtake family reading time. If we ever manage this for a third time, we may need a new copy.
Catching up
For a number of reasons stretching back to last spring and summer, I am late, or at least I feel late, with writing projects. I was set back by unexpected travel, time spent considering unanticipated opportunities, program launches and changes in our center and department, and a deferral of a sabbatical in order to fill an instructional need and take on a few special projects. I've missed a deadline or two, and I feel even further behind in correspondence about and submission of book proposals that have been under discussion with editors for some time. I've been late before, but I haven't felt this late before. (Nota bene: By including this confession, I am in part fulfilling a promise to a friend who just asked that I not fill this newsletter with productivity tips.)
The good news is that I've made progress in the past week, and have started to knock out some of these projects. Here are a couple things getting my attention right now:
I'm finishing a review of Daniel Vaca's Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America. (If you're the editor to whom this piece is a little bit late, know that it's coming soon.)
Notice anything? At least two things stand out about these three books, published by Yale, Princeton, and Harvard university presses within fifteen months of each other. (1) They're all titled "City on a Hill" (or, in Rodgers' case, "As a City on a Hill," if you want to get picky). (2) Krieger's book, which I assigned this semester in a course called Urban Planning and its Discontents, is about cities; the other two are about John Winthrop's sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," a history of the sermon's reception and influence, the mythology surrounding the sermon, and American exceptionalism. I think there's a review essay waiting to be written that explores some of the connections between these seemingly disparate things published at almost exactly the same time with almost exactly the same titles (though I've already had to study up a bit on Rome's founding myths -- with the help of Mary Beard's SPQR and a classicist friend with expertise in the area -- just to tighten some connections). We'll see if I'm right.
Once I get these finished, I'll get to work on a couple other short pieces and will also begin sorting out what comes next in the way of book projects. I gave in today and bought a real desk for use at home, because while it feels like I should be able to get my work done sitting on the couch, I've convinced myself that I'll get it done better and faster with a desk, and that my body (namely, my back and neck) will thank me for it.
"Online" teaching and learning
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the country has transitioned away from in-person education to online teaching and learning or "technology-mediated instruction." We have three children (grades 5, 7, and 10) and two professors (one in Spanish and the other in Urban Studies and Politics & International Relations) at home -- and I happen not only to be teaching two classes right now, but to be taking one (Greek 102) -- so we have a lot of this going on. Here are just a few observations:
- This experience is likely going to be a sort of Rorschach test. Many people will see in it just what their existing framework predisposes them to see. Some will see that online learning and unbundling of "classroom" experiences from other aspects of education can work just fine. Others will see proof that such an approach provides an extraordinarily attenuated version of what K-12 schools and residential colleges normally offer.
- I recall a recent conversation with a colleague at another institution who recently transitioned from teaching in that institution's online progams to teaching face-to-face. His colleagues said to him something like, "I'm sure you're glad that you made this transition, but isn't it a lot harder to teach face-to-face?" To which he replied that teaching online had actually been much more difficult. As someone who taught one course per year for seven years in a low-residency, hybrid/blended M.A. program at another university, I would say the same thing, and I'd guess that this is true for many teachers. This is not to say that teaching and learning online is as effective as or more effective than teaching in person, but just that, for many, it's more difficult.
- This transition is challenging in different ways for different disciplines, programs, and pedagogies. The transitions being made by music, art, acting, laboratories, and internships and other off-campus experiential learning are difficult in one way, while the transition being made by courses that teach delicate, sensitive, or controversial topics are difficult in another way. The same applies to the "level" of the course: Many assume that introductory courses should be easier to move online, but I don't believe that's true. Introductory courses are precisely where students need more guidance in order to see how the pieces fit together and to "map" or "index" a field of study or discipline. That often requires closer guidance, while more focused study at advanced levels may be more suited to a different kind of guidance (think of the difference between introductory courses and independent studies).
- It is important to remember that teaching and learning isn't really moving “online,” as if it has no physical space. Rather, the physical place of teaching and learning has migrated and multiplied, moving out of more uniform and controlled spaces into various spaces, including the living rooms and dining rooms of our students and their families, public libraries, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants in parts of the country where they're still open, and even shelters providing lodging for students with housing instability. What used to take place in a common environment with fairly stable and fairly shared norms for the ways in which students are challenged and supported by teachers and peers is now moving to many different places governed by different norms. Just like it’s a good practice to spend part or all of a first online session getting students accustomed to the technology that will be used in the class (preferably with low-stakes, but perhaps still course-related activities), it's probably also a good idea to spend some time thinking through together how certain norms and expectations (e.g., confidentiality, respect, handling of delicate subjects) should be operationalized in the multiple physical spaces students occupy for tech-mediated learning.
- We've all seen the horse-drawing meme, "Teaching in 2020."
There's something true about this, but something off about it, too. This meme suggests that teachers, who are like master artists, eventually end up with the stick-figure version of their instruction. There's something right about that, in the sense that our current transition often reduces instruction to something far less impressive than it would have been or in the sense that something important is given up along the way.
But this meme also misses something important. Any artist who can draw the back quarter of that horse can also draw the middle, the head, and that final stick-figure front leg. The artist who can draw the back of that horse has all the talent, time, and tools necessary to draw the front. That isn't true of our current situation. The master teacher doesn't necessarily have the talent, time, or tools necessary to make the initial transition well or to be prepared should illness, uneven student engagement, or technological disruptions require further pivots.
I'd propose that our current transition is a bit more like going on some expedition, and many are preparing their teachers and students for something like "glamping:"
The glamping version of this transition tries to take along whatever makes everyone feel most "at home." Many institutions have done the equivalent of telling everyone not to worry, "the campground has electricity for your devices, and even a wine refrigerator, so bring your hair dryers, your iPads, and your favorite bottle of wine." That is not to say that no one has had to leave anything at home, but that predominant impulse seems to be to take everything with us that we can, whether for class or other aspects of institutional life.
That will work nicely, unless things get more austere, like this:
(Yes, I resisted adding a photo or GIF of Hugh Glass spending the night inside a dead horse just to keep warm, just to have the horse meme and the horse meme go head to head, but I did think about it.)
In any case, I think we should, for the most part, plan for and equip ourselves for the worst case scenarios and work up from there. Our plans should be the sort that would still work if things got worse -- if students were more scattered or family needs kept them from full engagement, if technological disruptions were to impact courses negatively, if key personnel were to become ill. We should be ready for the wilderness trek, carrying just what's on our backs, taking a flexible and durable approach that will work either in the campground or off the trail. If we stumble into a fancy campground, great. If not, we're ready to pull off something more challenging.
Brief observations about observations about the pandemic
Family circumstances, and not just life disruptions, make COVID-19 feel very close for us. We have a family member being treated for pneumonia (in all likelihood caused by COVID-19), a family member waiting for test results, and a family member in charge of opening a quarantine facility in an emerging hotspot. Despite all this, I feel like I have very little to say about the situation, and I'm genuinely surprised by the number of people who are weighing in about it. Here are a few observations about the observations being made.
- I shouldn't be surprised at a lack of numeracy or bewildered by what people take to be evidence for their arguments, but I am.
- As the disease first began spreading in the U.S., what I found most interesting were the different ways people would marshal a comparison with the flu as part of their argument. For some, the flu already ravages us and kills many every year, and yet we let business as usual go on, and so we should get some perspective and chill out a little bit. For others, we needed to realize that we already have exposure to the flu, not to mention vaccines and treatments for it, and it nevertheless ravages us and kills many, so we needed to get some perspective and realize that a novel virus could be much worse.
- It is not surprising to me that we seem so utterly unprepared to talk about the ethics of the tragic, in which one or more goods must be given up, undermined, destroyed, or foregone to possess or secure one or more other goods. The conversation about the economic slowdown caused by containment and mitigation measures like social distancing has been so much more heat than light, and it has tended -- no surprise -- toward our typical responses to the tragic: denial, nihilism, skepticism, and paralysis. We need to do better with conversations like this, discussions about situations in which "Right collides with right!," which Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes as "the definitive context for responsible action." (I promise this newsletter will not be advertising for my work, but my most recent book was an attempt to work through just this problem in the realm of environmental politics, which has a lot of overlap with public health, historically speaking.)
- I am most interested in observations that I would call "subversive." As Cardinal Arns of Sao Paulo said, "To 'subvert' means to turn a situation around and look at it from the other side. That is, the side of the people who have to die so that the system can go on."
Recommended
To listen
- Eva Cassidy, "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "Autumn Leaves," and "What a Wonderful World"
- Abbey Lincoln, "Come Sunday"
To read
Not recommended
- Keeping your shopping list on your phone in the midst of the pandemic. My left thumb needed a bit of extra sanitizing afterward.
