Urgent note to the warden

You win. I’m cracking. Don’t you know solitary confinement is a cruel punishment?

I confess to everything. I robbed that bank. I’ll tell you where I hid the money. I’ll rat out my confederates. Just let me out to the general population again. I’ll never commit another crime, cross my heart and hope to die. I’m going mad in here!

I gotta say, though, the worst trick you pulled was assigning that sadistic brute to be the prison guard. She doesn’t talk, she only makes meaningless yowling sounds, and she occasionally runs through my cell and knocks everything over. I need to get out of here.

We’re always buried in books & papers, why are you complaining now?

Oh lord. I cringed so hard at this op-ed in Inside Higher Ed I think I might have pile-drived my cervical vertebrae right into the lumbar. Ouch. The author, Kristie Kiser, is giving advice to faculty about how to compose themselves for this new era of Zooming online.

In a world where conversations around us are terrifying, a student who has perceived Dr. Jones as a strong female role model, who is polished and eloquent at all times in the classroom, may be quite alarmed indeed to find Dr. Jones wearing her Pokémon pajamas with disheveled, unwashed hair, lamenting the added workload associated with social distancing. Your piles of unattended laundry are not trophies for the amount of time you are putting into your coursework. They are distractions, signs of disorganization and, quite frankly, unsightly and off-putting. Educators, please rethink your approach to your students. In these trying times, the last thing that they need to see is their adult, professional, highly educated instructor falling apart at the seams.

You see, if we don’t wash our hair, we’re falling apart at the seams. We’ve been driven out of our university offices, but it’s unprofessional if you post video from your bedroom. Don’t be unsightly. So what if your workload has abruptly doubled and you’ve found yourself in completely unfamiliar territory — for the honor of your institution, which is not paying you any extra for extra work, you must also perform all the superficial cosmetic stuff, because you must also look as poised and polished as if you’re appearing in the university’s recruiting brochures.

Heck, I don’t meet those standards under normal conditions. One of the painful realities of these committee meetings in zoom is that I get to see all my younger, better-looking colleagues in the gallery, and my face is also right there, to make the comparison easy to see. Yeah, I’m the homely sludge-beast squatting in the corner of your screen. I’m not brochure-quality at the best of times, and this is the worst of times. I can console myself that students are supposed to be taking in the quality of the information I can deliver, not the quality of my eyeliner nor my lean, muscular physique, but then the Pretty Police show up in the education journals, and the lies I tell myself all crumble.

Oh, well. All I’m seeing around my corner of the web is Kiser getting dunked on. See SkepChick for a complete tear-down, as deserved.

It’s been so thorough that I’m feeling sorry for Kristie Kiser. This is not to say she doesn’t deserve it, but she’s young — a doctoral student — and of an academic rank that requires guidance. Someone should have looked at that article submission, blanched, and said “You can’t possibly be planning to shame your colleagues for their appearance at this difficult time, can you?”, but instead…they published it. They might as well have nailed her up on a wall and provided baskets of stones. Now I’m wondering which would be worse: that an editor accepted it with a vicious smile and the knowledge that they’d be chumming the academic community with her blood, or that the editor actually agreed that their slovenly peers needed to be chastised. Either way, the editors were assholes and should be called out as well.

Mission accomplished

I blazed through the local grocery store and stocked up on various staples — also cat food (she snick’d her claws at me as I was going out the door, and I know what’s good for me), coffee, cheap cheese, onions, carrots, etc. I noticed that the toilet paper aisle was still an empty wasteland, which I don’t get at all; why are y’all pooping so much? Other points of absence were the dried beans, which I totally understand, that makes sense, and ramen was nearly all gone, unless you like the pork flavor.

I only saw one worker at the store wearing a mask, and no other customers were wearing one, although there weren’t very many in there at 7:30am, so that was a small sample. Now I think I can stay home for another two weeks. Only two weeks of classes left, too!

Ready to venture into the apocalyptic wasteland

Tomorrow, I’m planning on a brief excursion to the grocery store — just in and out, grabbing a few basics, and then escaping before the ‘rona gets me. But I have no mask! Skatje made me a nice shimmery green one, but she’s in Colorado under stay-at-home orders herself, and hasn’t been able to send it to me yet. So I improvised one, cut up an old t-shirt, and will line it with coffee filters. Will also wear a hat, scarf, and glasses.

I think I look like a low-budget 19th century highwayman. May hold up a coach as I assault the store, as well.

AAaaaaAaargh

This is hard. I’ve got decades of experience teaching face to face, and I’ve got a battery of notes and files to work from, and they’re all more or less useless right now — I have to invest so much time rewriting everything to make it work better in an online format, and further, I’ve got little interactive feedback from the students, so I don’t know if I’m making everything even more incomprehensible. I’m up late, I get up early, all focused on producing useful content, and I fall further and further behind on grading. And I’m alone at home.

I’m miserable. I need a good day of hanging out with spiders and even that is getting neglected for all this class development work that has suddenly been thrown in my lap.

Now we have to think about Fall classes — we’re having a meeting tomorrow to discuss what we’ll do if this situation continues for another six months. I fear it will. Our university has announced that it will announce a decision about Fall classes in June. Our idiot US president wants to pressure everyone to be fully open for business by early May. We’re coping with a disease with a long slow incubation period, so if we rush into business as usual we’re going to get an even bigger second wave, possibly in August, and we’re just going to have to reinvoke the stay-at-home orders again, and I’ll be doing cell biology online.

Unless the ‘rona gets me first. I don’t know which alternative to favor at this point. I suppose at least next semester I’d have a summer to prepare for it, unlike the current nightmare.

I am currently buried in class prep

But I have to make a post! Why? Because I realize that I’m totally isolated, I don’t go outside, I don’t talk to anyone, so if I were to drop dead, it might be days or weeks before anyone noticed…except that there’s this outside world that reads my blog, and would wonder what’s happening if I went silent.

So you know if I stopped posting for significantly more than 24 hours, you should immediately call our local mortuary in Morris and ask them to swing by to pick up my corpse. Before the evil cat eats my eyes. I know she’s thinking about it.

(You might be wondering why my students wouldn’t notice — I’m contacting them every weekday. It’s because I fear my sudden disappearance might translate into “HOLIDAY!” in their minds.)

Now back to the prep work. I have to explain imprinting to my genetics students, and that’s not an easy concept for most of them.

Credit where credit is due

A billionaire is giving away a significant fraction of his money to coronavirus relief. Jack Dorsey has said he’s donating $1 billion to the cause. This is a good start — he says it’s over 25% of his net worth — with a couple of reservations: he has only said he’s going to do this, and rich people have a reputation for not following through; distributing that much money is a huge, difficult task and Dorsey is not an expert on funding biomedical institutions; and damn, he shouldn’t have that much money in the first place.

He also still has a couple of billion dollars more in his pocket. He’s not going to be hurting.

Who is paying for this “service”?

I find it hard to believe any institution is shelling out money for these authoritarian proctoring services.

When University of Florida sophomore Cheyenne Keating felt a rush of nausea a few weeks ago during her at-home statistics exam, she looked into her webcam and asked the stranger on the other side: Is it okay to throw up at my desk?

He said yes. So halfway through the two-hour test, during which her every movement was scrutinized for cheating and no bathroom breaks were permitted, she vomited into a wicker basket, dabbed the mess with a blanket and got right back to work. The stranger saw everything. When the test was finished, he said she was free to log off. Only then could she clean herself up.

“Online proctor” services like these have already policed millions of American college exams, tapping into students’ cameras, microphones and computer screens when they take their tests at home. Now these companies are enjoying a rush of new business as the coronavirus pandemic closes thousands of American schools, and executives are racing to capture new clients during what some are calling a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This is contrary to any good teaching practice. When your paranoia is so great that you no longer trust your students to learn, then you can’t teach effectively. What is wrong with the University of Florida, or anyone else who coughs up money to have strangers sit and stare at their students?

If my university required this kind of nonsense, I’d tell them to fuck off, no way am I subjecting students to this kind of humiliation. Fortunately, I think most of my colleagues would express the same sentiment.