ReaderWriterVille

It’s almost fall, and the weather is already there. Now if the mosquitoes and biting flies would just take a hike, it would be perfect.

It was a “normal” week. TheH has his teaching routine down and my second class finally got going, so where we are is where we’ll be until Thanksgiving week, at least we will be if we don’t get shut down again. So far, so good; our Covid dashboard is not exploding. But we’re only partway through testing all the students.

WORK

I thought that campus would be busier once all the students came back, but it still feels pretty empty. Not as bad as before classes started, but with so many classes online and all the requirements of distancing and spacing if you do come to campus, there aren’t a lot of incentives to be present. From what I can tell everyone is adhering to the rules when on campus. I’ve heard stories of parties and gatherings off-campus, like every other school, but if they cause infections to spike it will take a while to show up in the numbers.

Work is pretty routinized at this point. I go in twice a week and teach from my office, which is easier and quieter, but there’s not really much to report. Everything is done via video-conferencing, even meetings with people who are local, because we’re not supposed to meet in person except when necessary. If you want to hold meetings outside you have to sign up for one of the designated spaces. It’s all in aid of abundant caution and effective contact tracing, I imagine, but it discourages anything spontaneous.

READING/WATCHING/LISTENING

One of my new-release library holds came in and I managed to finish the book in less than a week. It was Red Pill by Hari Kunzru. I really enjoyed White Tears a couple of years ago, and this one was not quite as good but well worth reading. The narrator is a writer who goes to Berlin on a three-month residency at a center/retreat, but he still can’t find a way to write and he winds up becoming caught up in intrigues about privacy, stories about surveilled life in East Germany, and crackpot alt-right theories about how the world works. He slowly loses his grip and the novel spirals into something even less grounded in the last third or so, but then returns to reality at the end. It’s a hard book to describe without giving away the whole storyline. It doesn’t quite succeed in what it’s trying to do, and Kunzru has as hard a time writing about the alt-right as most non-alt-right authors, but he is so smart and writes so well and in such an interesting way that I was swept along on the ride. As with White Tears, I continued to think about the novel and its ideas after I had finished.

Hello again. It’s been a while. Labor Day has come and gone, the university is fully starting back today, and we’re all holding our breaths to see if we can finish what we begin.

I spent most of my work time over the last two months preparing to teach my two classes. I took an online course to get more ideas on how to teach online courses, we drove to California without the dogs and spent three weeks, and we saw a handful of friends at a distance. Sometimes the days flew by and sometimes they took forever. But here we are.

WORK

I started my law school class three weeks ago. It’s fully remote, with at least half the students in different time zones, so I teach at 8am, which is the earliest I’ve ever met a class. I can’t say I enjoy teaching that early, but it does leave me with a lot of the teaching day free. So far it’s gone well. There was a lot of throat-clearing and introductory material in the first two weeks, because the students are new to the program and university and they’re missing the usual orientation activities. So we spend some time talking about non-class things. But they seem eager to get going and to learn.

I start my department grad class this week, finally, along with everyone else teaching in the parts of the university that were on the delayed timetable. The class is scheduled as a hybrid, with both in-person and remote attendance, but so far the majority of the students have informed me they’ll be remote. I have a feeling it’s going to wind up fully remote, but you never know. Both classes are synchronous, which means that while I have activities and assignments that try to compensate for not being in person, we’re still meeting as a class for the usual times. The main thing I want to figure out is how to get them to talk to each other outside class, since building cohort solidarity provides important resources in graduate school.

I had all kinds of plans for asynchronous pedagogy: narrated slides, podcasts, and of course the always recommended and mostly despised discussion boards. But the nature and purpose of my classes are such that student interaction is at least as important as what they learn individually. So I’m dialing back the out of class activities to focus on making the class a jumping off point for them to work together more.