“Just a former student” writes:

I hope you’re staying safe and healthy during these tumultuous times.

I wanted to hear how you’re coping with working from home and more importantly, your thoughts on how this COVID-19 pandemic will affect our economy. Do you think the government handing out coronavirus stimulus checks was a good idea? Or is increasing our national debt going to end up being a mistake?

Also, how is PSAS handling graduation?

Thanks!

I am safe and healthy aside from severe eye strain. Thank you for asking, and I hope you are well too, whoever you are.

Let me address the school stuff for now and the economic stuff in a later post, because there’s so much to be said. Teaching from home has generally been much tougher than teaching at school. Here’s a short list of my difficulties:

• Learning how to use Microsoft Teams for tele-teaching, for conferring with colleagues, making announcements, etc.
• Addressing student questions and concerns… though having a chat window where I can see their questions helps.
• Maintaining test security. Test security in this environment doesn’t exist.
• Monitoring student performance. Given the strain on the internet and the various degrees of internet access at home, the students can’t all turn their work in at the same time, so I can’t examine it all at the same time, and can’t give them feedback all at the same time.
• Adjusting lessons/lectures based on student feedback. This is partly due to the same concern mentioned above, partly due to not being able to see looks of confusion or contemplation, partly due to not being able to interpret the tone of a question if it’s typed in a chat window. Note that this doesn’t mean I’d actually change anything; I give exactly the same lectures every single year.

But there’s been some upside:

• Microsoft Teams makes it easier to get content to my students in case of absences– mine or theirs. And now I know how to use it.
• The commute to work is much easier and less tiring, though I now avoid my office like the plague, no pun intended, during my “off hours.”
• I’ve had time to think more carefully about what productive teaching entails. My conclusion is that I’ve been right all along and I’m going to keep talking at people. It works.

I think this whole mess could lead to some big structural changes in education. I’ll have more to add once I’m out of Internal Assessment Grading Mode, which should occur by Friday of this week. In the interest of helping us cope with the cancellation of the IB exams, IB decided to make my grading process 9.2 times harder this year by requiring commentary on 92 papers instead of a random sample of 10. So my brain is fried right now and is crying for sleep.

We don’t yet know how graduation is going to be handled, and I hesitate to share my own ideas for fear of getting blamed for a second wave of COVID starting in late May or early June.

That’s it for now. More later.

…

EDIT: A quick Google search reveals a grand total of zero hits for “pandemucation.” I’m calling it now, and first.