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?
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