Total Pageviews

Thursday, March 3, 2022

COVID Chronicles XXVI: Not With a Bang, but a Whimper, It’s Over… Or is it?

 COVID in the workplace.  Pandemic vs. Endemic.  COVID recovery.  End of masking.




Two weeks ago, I read in the local newspaper that my University had decided to no longer require students to wear masks indoors effective Friday before last.  Later in the week, I received a communication from the provost that I was, under no circumstances, to require any student to wear a mask in my classroom after Friday nor even to request that they do so.  The sole caveat was that if I have a certified disability, I can request to teach my classes remotely under the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The authoritarian tone of the letter did not sit well with me (or 100 of my colleagues, who collectively signed a letter requesting a meeting of the faculty to discuss a response to it).

Why did they make this decision when they did?  No rationale was offered.  There were good reasons to consider it – our recent local surge in cases has largely resolved – the number of new cases is plummeting and there is lots of room in the hospitals.  We have 95% vaccination rates among students (who are required to be vaccinated) and 95% compliance among faculty and staff.  We have very small numbers of students and faculty/staff who are currently quarantined. 

Though these numbers are good, it is also the case that students and faculty are openly defying the guidelines for reporting symptoms and/or positive tests and are self-quarantining rather than having the University impose overly long and restrictive quarantine periods.  Instead students, at least in my classes, are reporting mild symptoms and asking for help with assignments until they are symptom free.  Breakthrough cases of omicron are reported by friends and colleagues with some regularity, though the symptoms are generally mild.

We have wondered privately whether the decision to unmask was made because people are staying away from basketball games where they are required to be masked (but see students watching and cheering unmasked), and so the loss of revenue is driving this.  We have also wondered whether there is pressure from parents or students to unmask, though many students that we have informally canvased have been worried about our being a leader in this area.  Of course, it could be because our very conservative board is pressuring the President to unmask because they don’t believe that this is a real crisis.  I think the last possibility is unlikely, but with a lack of information, we wonder…

Why should we get rid of the mask restrictions?  Because it is difficult to communicate when we are masked.  When I was engaged in a runaway slave role playing experience (on two occasions in two places) the first instruction was that, as a 19th Century African American slave, we were not to look any white person in the face.  It had a profound effect on me – I immediately lost about 20 IQ points.  I had a hard time understanding even simple commands (which was pretty much all that the role playing slave masters and runaway slave helpers offered). 

It was amazing how much I had depended on facial cues to understand others.  Masking leaves some cues, but I think we do more lip reading than we know – and identifying a smile from the crinkle in the eyes is not nearly as gratifying as seeing a big grin.   Learning is tough business.  We need all hands on deck to accomplish it.  Loss of facial cues has got to be hard on students. 

Of course it was worse when half of the students were on zoom.  They have all been in the classroom this semester.  But that has also meant that they are taking their first closed book exams in two years.  And the results are abysmal.  I am teaching a class to mostly Seniors with a few Juniors.  The grades in the class have gone up radically in the past two years, though the quality of their essays has plummeted.

The tests have been open book because the students have not all been able to be in the classroom, so when some are remote and can’t be monitored, it only makes sense for it to be open book for all…  But this means that students haven’t needed to study in the same way.  With electronic texts, they can search for the answers to questions in the text!  It is not hard to do well on an exam.  Even with paper texts, they can google fish for answers…

This semester, the students have been taking the same exams as in the past, but the mean score is a whole grade below what it was before the pandemic.  After the last exam, the students and I had a conversation about how to integrate the information in such a way that it is retrievable – this is a skill they have not worked on during very important years in college to do that…

The other thing that has changed is class attendance.  Where I teach, unlike some places, traditionally almost all of my students come to all of my classes.  When they aren’t going to be there, they have generally written to say why they are not going to be there.  Not so this semester.  After two years of taking classes by zoom and not turning on their screens and doing who knows what during class, there seems to have been a noticeable shift in the attendance culture.  Most of the students still come to class, but not all of them, and there are days when only half the class is there.

The culture of the classroom has radically shifted during the pandemic.  We need to reconnect with our students – and reinstitute some of the things that helped them be engaged in the task of learning – the central task of their being at school.  Indeed, when we worked on rewriting the University Mission Statement, something that had become bloated and unfocused, we polled the University about what elements to keep and the statement that had universal support was a statement about the University being a place to learn.

So, masks off should be a call to do more than celebrate, it should be a call to action – to recreating the learning culture – but I’m certain the social culture for the students has taken a huge hit as well.  It certainly has taken a hit for the faculty.  I am still not allowed to use my office on campus – and I am reluctant to return to it.  I have a new routine that is well established and I like working from home.  Do I need to commit to being on campus more?  What do we need to change to return to what we were doing?

Perhaps the more interesting question is – given that we will be constructing something, what should that be?  Yes, there were good things about the old model.  What from the experiences of the last two years do we want to keep in place?  Certainly many of my vaccinated patients who have had the opportunity to return to meeting in person with masks have chosen to continue to meet remotely, though some have been back in the office from the first opportunity that was available, even with masks.  What patients prefer remote therapy and why?

What remote learning tools should we keep?  In a recent post, I described how the administration has done away with snow days because we can meet remotely (though they don’t want us to use zoom rooms – go figure…).  There are features of the learning environment we use (we use Canvas – Blackboard  is another product and I know there are others) that have enhanced the learning opportunities.  What should we do about classroom flexibility?  Is that a good thing?

We are asking these questions about psychotherapy and psychoanalysis – I know because of serving on granting boards where people are proposing research that will address the question of how telehealth differs from in person therapy and who will respond well to what.  I assume that there are similar grants being proposed to study remote versus in person teaching and learning.  But in both cases we need to proceed while we gather this information.  These are questions for teachers and therapists to ponder and experiment with – just as the researchers will be doing that.

So: Masks Off!  Even (and perhaps especially) if this not the end of the epidemic, we should be working on articulating what we have gained, acknowledge all that we have lost (which is a great deal) and celebrate that which survives.  This is an opportunity for us to work as leaders in education. 

My central concern is that we have become cowed by an administration that was as stressed as we were by living in an environment that was out of our control.  One way of recovering from trauma, especially when we think of trauma as the loss of executive control, is to regain that control.  The administration appears to have been doing that by creating edicts – including that we should take our masks off, but in myriad other ways – telling us to get back in the classroom, cutting our pay, telling us to work on snow days and how we can and cannot teach while we do that, and eliminating programs without following a protocol that allows the faculty to weigh in on the process.

I have proposed that we work with the administration to use the unmasking – now that the CDC has followed our administrations lead and removed mask mandates – as a means towards marking the shift towards rebuilding a learning culture.  The faculty as a whole was more interested in wresting control back from the administration and we will vote on whether to send our representatives to the administration to appeal our power to assert our right to have students wear masks in our classroom  - that the University policy should be that the University will support autonomy in determining the best learning environment to the teacher of the class.  This has the advantage that if there is a student who is immunocompromised, they can petition the teacher to require the class to mask...

Whatever we end up doing, the important issue is that learning is different from teaching.  Learning requires the active engagement of the learner.  Teaching can only have an impact when the learner is engaged.  As we encourage our students to engage in the learning process, can we do this without mirroring the administration’s model of imposing structure rather than flexibly discovering, along with the learners, how best to engage in this difficult process?  How can we best help our students recover from these lost (or at least partially missing) years?

   To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 


For other posts on COVID:
I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

    

No comments:

Post a Comment

The Covenant of Water: Is it a Great Book?

 Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Diversity, Quality Is The Covenant of Water a Great Book?   Abraham Vergh...