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Last week my mom stumped me when she asked, “So, what’s new?”
Basically, nothing, outside of work.
It’s an aspect of quarantine I hadn’t really thought about until it happened.
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Fall planning is quite a challenge. One underappreciated aspect of it is that the fall course schedule has been up for a while, and students have already started registering for classes. It’s not a blank slate. Any major changes would involve going into the system and making them manually, bit by bit.
In some ways, the “total” scenarios are the easiest. If we’re totally back to normal, that’s easy. If we’re totally online, that’s not easy, but it’s clear. If we’re back, but with strict limits on how many students in a room at once, that’s much more complicated.
For historical reasons, most of the classes here meet once a week for three hours. Students have already started building schedules around that. If we’re limited to, say, a dozen students in a room at a time, then a class of 30 needs to be split into three. And splitting a three-hour block into three separate shifts makes it difficult to do sufficient cleaning in between the cohorts (let alone putting the professor in the weird position of repeating themselves in rapid succession).
Community colleges get credit for being “nimble,” and there’s some truth to that. But even we have constraints.
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Finally, in the spirit of comic relief, a couple of animal-related tweets that brightened my week:
A Shakespearean standoff at the Denver Zoo. The comments are worth it.
The best TV weather forecast ever.
