School is back, and while I’d like to think The Age of The Virus is in its twilight death throes, the powers-that-be seem intent on foisting fearmongering variants upon us, no doubt as a pretext to strip us of more of our civil liberties.
Regardless, we’re starting back normally this year—as normally as possible—with a whopping 408 (and counting) students. Considering we had fewer than 100 students a decade ago, that’s a pretty huge change.
Hopefully we won’t have any major outbreaks this year, as we largely avoided last school year. We managed to get through with only a few isolated cases among students and faculty, and finished up with life largely back to normal in the final two months of the year.
It’s interesting looking back to the beginning of last school year and seeing how the year progressed. The fiasco of using Loom lasted about two weeks for yours portly; I quickly reverted to using the desktop version of Google Meet to record my lectures.
I’m also relieved that I won’t be livestreaming classes anymore. I don’t have anything to hide; it’s just a huge hassle getting online kids logged in, much less engaged. There’d frequently be times when I was ten minutes into class and a student would log in after being marked absent; sometimes I wouldn’t catch that the student had entered class, and the student would then complain about the absence.
More frequently, students would log in the moment I’d sent the attendance e-mail to the registrar, so I’d have to resend the e-mail. Sometimes the registrar wouldn’t see that second e-mail, and I’d get a call in the middle of class asking if the “missing” student had logged into class.
Those were minor issues when compared to bigger problems with the online platform—students suddenly switching to distance learning on test days, for example—but still headaches. It probably cost a good five-to-ten minutes of class time just to take attendance.
Well, here’s to the normal amount of craziness and bureaucratic overreach of the typical school year. With that, here is 28 August 2020’s “First Week of School in The Age of The Virus“:
Read More »