When you unfortunately need to go to a friend’s funeral, you also have to figure out how to get there. You need to make arrangements for hotel stay, travel, find out exactly when and where the services will be. Maybe travel won’t go to plan, and there are things you can rightly complain about. But the main reason why you go to the funeral is for your friend you lost. It’s about the celebration of life, not the travel details.
At present, we have a lot on our plates. Converting an in-person class to online/virtual format is a huge task, and all the more challenging under the weight and stress of a crisis. But in the big picture how we deliver our content online is like the travel details to attend a friend's funeral. We have a lot of huge issues now that we never had to deal with before.
Lots of things don’t compute right now, since coronavirus arrived. I don't have a lot of answers. I do have some thoughts. Our whole world, our daily lives, even potentially our very own health and the health of loved ones are threatened. We are witnessing leaders call for trading lives to save the Dow Jones average. We are hearing reports of healthcare workers on the front lines, without proper equipment and support. Family businesses are going out of business. We are also seeing racism against Asians and Asian Americans.
In light of this, going on with business as usual with our teaching is for me something I am struggling with. I know this is a personal viewpoint. Some may need to dive into the details of a class to cope and distract. I get that, and I’m not arguing against what others are doing in this same situation. What I am saying is that I personally can’t just sit back and say nothing or just teach my spring quarter class just like I did the last time. The world has changed, and so have I. In April, May and possibly beyond, we’ll be in the midst of toughest part of the first wave of the coronavirus. You can’t just ignore all the bodies in the corner, while going on about integration by parts without acknowledging what’s happening.
At the same time, we can’t lose sight of the goals of our classes. We still need to educate. Students still need to learn and build up for their lives and careers. I’m not advocating for not teaching content either.
The world has far too many damaging, false dichotomies. Choosing between lives and the economy is the latest, terribly inhuman example. Others suggest we must choose between skills and conceptual understanding. Some suggest, falsely, that the choice is between helping underrepresented students or white students, as if kindness and inclusion is like pie. False dichotomies are red flags. It signals an agenda, bias, lazy thinking, or unwillingness to dig into the details of a complex issue.
The question for me at least is whether we will choose to be responsible to each other and ourselves and behave like grown ups. Responsible adults study the data and evidence, and get on with solving problems in this new normal.
Specific to education, teachers can inspire and attend to basic skills, as well as ask students in earnest, “How are you doing?” Teachers can be flexible with lessons because the news we all just received is truly bad. Teachers can keep the door open, create space in class and in office hours (even virtually), check in on students, and show their own humanity, reasoning, and maturity in the face of a global crisis. We are all scared. We all feel a range of emotions, and none of us have it all figured out or know what the future holds.
I’m teaching integral calculus online starting in about a week, and I plan to create spaces to build some community and have time set aside for us to discuss the global pandemic and how students are dealing with it. We (students and instructors) all have smart things we can share that will help others, and we can teach and learn to be better to one another. I'll also spend a lot of time developing an assessment plan that is standards based/mastery based, so that the stress of testing is taken off. The focus should be on learning (as always and even more important now). That in a nutshell is how I'll try to be a responsible adult in my role as a math instructor. I teach students first and foremost, with Math as the context.
Yes, we can teach the usual things, all the while putting humanity first.