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.

Maybe I’ll banhammer someone live on video!

I usually avoid the YouTube comments (always good advice), but I noticed that my video on “The Fallacy of Biological Sex” has accumulated over 50 comments — I know, that’s pathetic, but I am a baby YouTuber — so I was going to dive in and clean up and maybe even answer some. Then I thought…I could make a spectacle of it! That’s the YouTube spirit!

So this afternoon, as a break from grading, I thought I’d browse them live at 3pm Central time, right here.

This may be a terrible mistake, but I figure I needed more practice configuring live streams, so let’s go for it.