Day 170, September 2, 2020
Learning to Cook Orzo
Tonight's Soundtrack: Jeff Beck Live in 2017
September is always a strange time of the year for me. The start of a new school year coincides with my birthday so that there is an alternate alignment of time and the passage of time. It is like the way different federal and state agencies utilize different fiscal years for grants or allocations. I am uncertain why nobody measures the passage of time utilizing the calendar, but January seems to be the beginning only for calendars and resolutions.
September, in the realm of education, is the sudden return of large numbers of students, it is when faculty are back on contract, it is the end of summer and the start of the fall. September means the days of sugar corn are numbered, and I am one year older. Our bodies belie the mind's ignorance of the passage of time with the little things that sometimes grow into the larger things that ail us; make it a little harder to sit down in, or get up from a chair; the odd things we can no longer eat. At times I find myself consciously thinking through what I should eat for breakfast that will make it easier for my intestines for the rest of the day. Sigh.
Each weekday morning, I try to do the same number of pushups that I am years old. In a few days I will need to increase that number by one, but I already feel like I'm at my capacity when I reach the appropriate number now. I will somehow have to convince myself to do one more. It is how it is.
The end of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant is a beautiful treatise on the changes time wreaks on bodies, on love... how complicated a thing our bodies become, and how complicated love can be over a lifetime. It is beautiful. It feels like a tribute of sorts to the passing of an era, the end of a time... which I guess this feels like too... how all the things we came to expect as the normal, natural progression of things, has been upended. It is like we have come to the twist in the plot and suddenly we are learning something new, making a discovery.
I was in a meeting the other day and a faculty member said that education will never be able to go back to the way it was. That startled me and I wanted to meditate on that for a bit. It seems easy to just blindly agree without seeing the idea all the way through. But he was right, it does seem different, radically different, helping students over the last few weeks. For working adults, parents, for a whole range of reasons, we are seeing people gravitating to education, particularly the asynchronous classes with none of the required face-to-face meeting times that we educators so value. We are offering classes we never imagined offering online, and students are flocking to these classes. It is incredible. We clearly are seeing fewer students, and fewer traditional age students, but there is a whole other population that is suddenly able to take advantage of the opportunity that COVID has wrought on the world.
Before the pandemic struck, we were in the midst of trying to plan for the demographic shifts that predicted a radical reduction in the number of traditional age college students in our region. Over the next decade our college will become smaller, and we will need to think of new and different ways to deliver education. And the pandemic has done both of those things. We are a very different college than we were just a few months ago. How we are delivering curriculum, even when we mark the beginning of the year is shifting so that we have more late start classes, more 1/2 semester classes, and nearly everything is offered in a variety of synchronous or asynchronous online formats.
I think that faculty member was right. We are seeing the future. Of course, eventually, we will have face to face classes again, but now that students are seeing what is possible, and not just students, but people working 40 hour a week jobs, parents with kids learning at home, care takers, people who never envisioned being able to be students are now accessing education with the convenience we have come to expect from the internet era when I can order a pail of dishwasher detergent pouches at any hour of the night, learn how to cook orzo, and watch an entire Jeff Beck concert from Switzerland. Of course, watching Jeff Beck on a 15" laptop screen is very different than actually seeing him on stage in front of me. The camera angles and fidelity of the video are amazing, to be sure, but different from being there and feeling the music in your whole body and feeling the vibrations of the music moving through the crowd.
So, the future is evolving. We are seeing it as clearly as the glaciers that are melting into the oceans. Now we need to see how we transform what we hold as most valuable in what we do. What will it look like, and how do we maintain integrity in everything even when it looks so different? And, how do we give the face to face experience, the treasured relationship building, and the flexibility and autonomy many of our students want?
Despite the uncertainty, this vision of the future also gives me hope. Once the pandemic is over, and it will eventually end, we will be able to build back those areas of strength that we have always had, and we will be able to offer curriculum in ways we we never imagined possible. We will open accessibility to so many more people that it may allow us to continue to thrive and flourish, even in a time of more limited resources and demographic changes that predict a much smaller college.
Good luck with the start of the new semester!
Be well,
Leo
From Our Friends:
From Academic Impressions:
September 16 - 17, 2020 | Virtual Conference
Take action to examine your knowledge base, unpack biases, and make your classroom and materials more inclusive.
Myron R. Anderson, Ph.D., and Kathryn S. Young, Ph.D. | Article
The authors of Fix Your Climate, two leading experts on hierarchical microaggressions, discuss how microaggressions operate within an academic workplace and offer a few quick tips for identifying and reducing them.
From ACE Engage:
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From EducationAdminWebAdvisor:
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From Teaching Tolerance:
Resources for Confronting White Nationalism
Educators can play a critical role in recognizing and addressing white nationalism. Two authors of Western States Center’s toolkit, Confronting White Nationalism in Schools, explain how in an interview with Teaching Tolerance. Learn more about what educators can do to help guard against this rhetoric and how theConfronting White Nationalism in Schools toolkit can help.From Mass Poetry:
We are looking for a Director for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Offered in partnership with Salem State University, the Festival Director will serve in a contract role through next spring as we prepare to re-launch the festival in May 2021 as a biannual event in Salem, MA. The application deadline is October 15th, 2020. Questions regarding the position, application process, or the festival can be sent to:festival@masspoetry.org.
From the Arts Funding Watch:
| Mellon Foundation launches fund to assist artists impacted by COVID | |||||||
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From the REBLS Network:
Request for REBLS Seed Grant Proposals
Have a REBLS project you’d like to develop? Apply for a REBLS Seed grant for up to $10K for projects related to the mission of the network. The first set of applications are due Oct. 1, 2020. As funds permit, applications will also be accepted on Feb. 1, 2021, and June 1, 2021
Concerned about the barriers to education faced by under-resourced students in this era of online learning? Join us!
Contact Gordon Snyder, gsnyder@hcc.edu, if this is something you would like to work on.
Today's Online Teaching Tips:
From GCC Librarian Liza Harrington:
How to embed streaming videos in your Moodle course: https://youtu.be/YcVnJTYZKVs. The video is…too long. But again, going for speed/relevancy over perfection. First half is the technical aspect of using library streaming services; second half discusses how licenses work with both library materials and Netflix/Hulu/Amazon.
From EducationAdminWebAdvisor:
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From Academic Impressions:
September 14, 2020 or October 5, 2020 | Virtual Training
Learn some simple ways you can improve the quality of your communication and connections with others online.
September 28, 2020 | Webcast
Recognize the warning signs of student distress and understand how to take appropriate action.
From Inside Higher Ed:
Welcoming Activities That Work
Professors, think again before having students simply make rules on the first day of class, and instead create ways to truly engage them, Andrew Joseph Pegoda urges. »
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