Teaching is a whole new world nowadays. I faced three different problems today.

One of our sports teams has been exposed to COVID-19, and they’ve been quarantined and can’t come to class.
Solution: I’ll be recording my lectures for a while and passing them on to the affected students. Also, we’ve been working through some genetics problems, so I’m forwarding those for them to work on in their isolation chambers.

A student had a serious family crisis and had to miss the last exam, and is panicking over it.
Solution: For them, I’ll pretend that exam never happened, and their final grade will be based on the average of four exams, rather than five, like the rest of the class. The exams are cumulative so it’s not like they won’t be evaluated on part of the class.

One of my international students has been abruptly drafted into the military service for a certain Eurasian country, and is flying away from the US prematurely.
Wooo. I wouldn’t want to be in that situation. Solution: I am arranging to email them a take-home final exam so they can get credit for the course, and I hope come back to finish up their degree.

I’m thinking now that I actually have it pretty easy. My job is to make everything as smooth and doable for the students who don’t have it so easy.

All we have to do next is end the pandemic, all other health problems, and end war, and teaching will get easier.

But I finally finished the exam for introductory biology. There were two huge problems.

1. Never again will I give a take-home multiple choice exam. I thought I was being generous: 16 multiple choice questions, one multi-part essay question, and I even gave them a form to fill in. Somehow, many of them didn’t follow the instructions. A form with a space to put in A, B, C, or D for the answer? Nope. Many wrote out answers. What I thought would be an easy grading exercise turned into a nightmare. If I were to do it again, I’d be extremely obvious and specific in how to answer.
2. Scores were abysmal, but that’s on me. I didn’t spend enough time going over the problems…so now I have to backtrack and cover the material again and give them some more exercises to try out.

Now I have to collapse in a soggy heap. Tomorrow it begins again with an exam from my second course.

Today I tried to lead my students through some simple genetics problems over Zoom. In class, it would be easy: put up the problem, have the students pull out a piece of paper and try to solve it, while I wander the classroom seeing what they were doing, offering hints and suggestions as I go, and at the end I’d have an idea of where the individuals were struggling.

On Zoom, nope.

I’d present the problem, and then…no, I have no way to observe the process. I told them they could let me know their answer over the private chat, and if it looked good, I’d call on them and they could explain how they solved it.

First difficulty: these are smart students, and they quickly figured out the flaw in my plan. If they gave the answer, I’d call on them; simple solution: sit on the answer for as long as possible. The first problem I put up produced a deadly silence, with all those black rectangles not showing anything, and my chat window being totally blank. I’d try to nudge them along, but not knowing where they were in the problem meant I had no idea where they were stuck. Or if they even were stuck.

They started to warm up as the hour went on — probably as they realized these weren’t really that hard, and they were seeing how to reach the solution — but it was still agonizing. It took us the whole hour to do 3 problems. And I’ve promised/threatened to do it again on Thursday. As it stands, they’re getting an exam next week and I’ve had little opportunity to interact with them to work through even simple problems.

Stupid virus. Let me get back into a real classroom again.

I’m caught up on a lot of grading, but today I now have to explain while they got so much wrong. The mean on the last exam was 75, which isn’t bad, but a lot of students are certain they deserve an A on everything, so I have to tell them today that the grade they got was the grade they deserve, and then explain how to solve the problems correctly. Many of the errors were due to invalid assumptions. For example, some people were confused by the term “wild type” — they had it in their heads, largely from their introductory population genetics course, that wild type was simply the most common phenotype in the cross, so for instance, whatever the phenotype of the heterozygotes was in a simple hybrid cross, that was “wild type”. Yikes. So now I also have to reset my brain and stop assuming they know all the basic conventions.

Next bit of fun: we’re wrapping up a standard complementation assay in the lab, so I have to talk to them about writing up a lab report, which means that, while I’ve finished a painful backlog of grading, I’m about to tell them to create a lot more work for me.

Somehow, in all that, I also have to teach them about deletions, duplications, and translocations this week, and then next week we plunge into the happy world of recombination and gene mapping, and more math. Sometimes I wonder how I can keep going, since I’m pretty sure that by the end of the semester all of my students hate me.