Lately I keep repeating the same vicious cycle of syllabus-tweaking: make a change to an assignment to accommodate pandemic conditions, adjust surrounding assignments so they work well together, and then wake up suddenly in the middle of the night realizing that I need to change it all back again.
The issues are tiny individually but awkward in aggregate. Here's just one example: in a sophomore-level literature class full of (mostly) non-majors, my usual practice is to give unannounced reading quizzes about once a week to encourage students to keep up with the reading and to introduce them to the kinds of questions they'll encounter on exams. However, I also need to minimize paper-passing, so okay, let's put the quizzes online. But then I would need to either let students take the quizzes outside of class (in which case I have to get involved with online proctoring, which seems like a lot of fuss for a 10-point quiz) or else require them to bring laptop computers to take the quiz in class--while I try to monitor 18-20 computers for cheating in a classroom set up for maximum social distancing.
Just thinking about it makes me want to lie down.
So okay, we can skip the reading quizzes and come up with some other kind of reading response, which requires yet another series of tweaks to the syllabus until I figure out that my plan is once again flawed and I have to go and do the whole thing again. And that's just one class. I'm teaching four different preps starting two weeks from now. I foresee a lot of hand-wringing and sleepless nights in my immediate future, until I realize that I'm just not going to be able to produce the perfect class under current conditions. Maybe what we all need to do is stop tweaking and embrace the imperfections.
Yeah, right. You first.
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