The View from the Hermitage, Day 168

Another week down, the 24th. I would say that we're six months in using the 

                4 weeks = 1 month

 standard, but will instead use what seems like a more correctstandard

                1 year = 52 weeks; therefore, 6 months = 26 weeks.

Either way, we've been at this pretty damn long.

I am not sure that the university administration realizes the toll teaching online is taking on some faculty members, including the husband. In a field such as history or literature, there aren't as many visuals as in a field such as physics. Syncing the slides up with the lecture is taking a couple of hours for each 50-minute lecture. (I asked the husband if things took this long prepping an in-person lecture, and he said it took virtually no extra time for an in-person class.) As a result, the husband worked all day yesterday which was, of course, a Saturday, on the lecture he taped last night. The lengthy prep for the lectures cuts into the other work he's supposed to be doing such as his research or service to his department. He's on the undergraduate teaching committee and also assigns all the teaching assistants and graders. As we were brushing teeth yesterday evening, he sighed that he was ready for the pandemic to be over. My thought? Aren't we all.

His care in syncing everything up is not for naught. After the first class, he got an email from one of the students saying that being able to see the slide on one half of the screen and the husband talking on the other was very helpful and made it easier to follow the lecture than in some of his other online classes. So the extra time seems well worth it ... at least as long as the student remembers to note this fact on the end-of-course faculty evaluation form.

I went to high school and undergraduate college in a smallish town in Southwest Virginia, Radford. It seems as if the Radford University students returned and the town suddenly became tenth in the country on a New York Times ranking of the highest number of cases per resident. That fact was known when the local university made their decision to go ahead with having undergraduates come or come back. Word on the street has it that the university originally planned to make the announcement at 10:00 a.m. on Friday and was still considering options the night before. Something in that consideration caused enough indecision that the announcement didn't come out until 4:51 p.m.

In a related matter that really could and should have been handled better, the university followed the announcement by emailing students assigned to live in three dorms, including a language house and a residential college, and informed them that those buildings were going to be used for isolation and quarantine, so they would need to move to other dorms. If the "new" dorm cost more than the original one, they would not be charged with the difference. It did not appear, though, as if they would get a refund if the new dorm were cheaper. One would think that some warning might have been given earlier even if it were just an FYI type of message.

In the interest of keeping my blood pressure under control, I'm choosing to omit any discussion of the upcoming elections at any level. Tomorrow being a Monday, it seems better to wait.