Academia During a Pandemic: Hunker Down Philosophy 3A
Today marks the resumption of classes at Bemidji State University, all of which are now housed online. Many of my colleagues around the world have come up with a variety of different ways of flipping their classes over. My focus has been on enhancing online interaction and replacing face-to-face interaction as much as is reasonable. And as I mentioned before, the former involves discussion threads and the latter involves Zoom conferences! Monday and Tuesday encompassed the bulk of my Zoom meetings. One of my classes will meet for a second time tomorrow (their request); otherwise, every class has met, giving me a little insight into how this is all going to go. TL;DR: yeah, it’ll work. Here are a few observations after running 4 sessions:
Today is Not a Productive Day
I did not get much done today aside from making a few corrections on syllabi and clearing out a bunch of emails. In truth, today has been a pretty piss poor day even for non-work productivity. No additions to the book catalogue. No blog posts (until now). No podcast editing. No editing editing. Really, not a whole lot of anything got done. I imagine we’ll see many of these over the next few weeks, especially now that Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz (who I voted for (thankfully)), has issued a shelter-in-place order. Part of this is actually my own doing: I made a pact with myself that “home” would be a separate zone from “work” solely so I can maintain a bit of critical distance; now those two have to come together, and that’s creating…issues. Part of this is only kinda my doing: working and working and working, even when you’re doing things you actually like, can be enormously draining, and I definitely hit my burnout point several years ago when I was still in grad school.
One More Week!
In a lot of ways, I’ve been pretty fortunate to work for Bemidji State University. While losing two weeks of class sucks, BSU didn’t choose to rush into the university-wide shift to remote learning. The result? A lot more breathing room (for me). So in addition to all of the things I’ve been doing to keep my mind off the nightmare sweeping across the United States (today: taking a walk, playing some video games, and petting my cat), I’ve also been working hard on adjusting syllabi…and tempering my expectations. Even two weeks doesn’t feel like it’s enough…
Academia During a Pandemic: Hunker Down Philosophy 2A
I made it through a week of isolation. Mostly. I still went “out,” but in my car to play Pokemon or to occasionally go to the store to get things I wasn’t able to get earlier. At odd hours. In that time, I’ve apparently decided to blog on a regular basis, catalogue my books (finally), watch an absurd amount of TV, schedule an impromptu podcast recording, and prep my classes for remote learning. It’s been a weird week, y’all. A scary week. The one upside to all of this is that I’m pretty sure most of my classes are going to be OK once we switch over to remote learning. While it won’t be ideal, most of my classes are already fairly embedded in digital tools anyway. For those classes, simply upping the stakes on managing the course wiki and wiki-based assignments is a no-brainer. For the other classes, the big question will be whether we can keep certain things “as is” or whether I need to adjust certain assignments and structures for a different mode.
The Science Fiction Research I Didn’t Present This Weekend
As many of you know, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) has been cancelled. I am a regular attendee and have presented my research there several times. This year, I was set to moderate a panel and present an essay entitled “Postcolonial Thought, Decolonizing the Anthropocene, and Tobias S. Buckell’s Climate Change Novels.” That project is now on hold until I can find the time to put in edits and submit it somewhere. However, I will talk a bit about the research that went into this project. Strap in!