A new breed of anxiety dreams

In my nightmare I'm surrounded by a scrum of shoving students, all brandishing 45-rpm records and demanding my approval, and none of them are wearing masks.  

Teaching anxiety takes many forms and today it's a combination of unruly mobs, unworkable technology, and unawareness of proper pandemic protocol. Students aren't even back on campus yet but already I'm dreading what new horrors the spring semester will bring--and that was before I read the article on Inside Higher Ed about the vast increase in Covid-19 infection rates in counties where universities rely primarily on in-person instruction. Granted, the study looked at large public universities and not small private colleges, but it's hard to imagine that Ohio's post-holiday surge in cases won't affect even our little corner of Appalachia.  

How will this be different from past spring semesters? No breaks, for one thing--no long weekends, no Spring Break, just a single day off on a Wednesday in the middle of March. The goal is to keep students on campus, which didn't work all that well last semester but hope springs eternal. Social distancing requires different classroom setups so once again I'll be teaching in rooms I hate, although this time at least they're all in the same building. I can put up with horrible rooms just this once.

Of course that's what I told myself last semester about so many things--just this once I'll teach simultaneously to students who are present and others who are online; just this once I'll use put all my exams online and use online proctoring; just this once I'll forego unannounced reading quizzes because there's no equitable way to give the quiz when some students are face-to-face while others are on Zoom.

And just this once I'll prepare four spring semester syllabi crammed with Covid-19 guidelines about mask-wearing, Zoom participation, social distancing, and supporting one another. A clever colleague has come up with a "No-nose policy": if she can get through the whole semester without ever having to tell a student to pull a mask up over his or her nose, the whole class will get extra credit. Of course this won't work in my classes because I won't be able to see the students who sit in the back of my socially distanced classrooms. Oh, to have younger eyes--or smaller classes!