I’ve had versions of this post in drafts for nearly a month. I’m finally comfortable enough making the post.
Because we’re six weeks into the semester, and I’m six weeks into seeing a class face-to-face nearly every weekday.
And it’s been…OK.
I don’t write that to minimize what other places are dealing with, or to minimize the risks of what we’re dealing with. I’m just dealing with one place’s experience, one set of stressors. And I’m aware enough to realize that everything could go completely haywire tomorrow. But to this point, everything here has been reasonably not-bad.
There have been hiccups. There have been needs for students to quarantine. This past week, there was even the need for the professor to quarantine. But those needs came out of the abundance of caution, the vigilance to take even minor occurrence of symptoms seriously and to take every possible proper step to ensure that spread doesn’t happen. And spread hasn’t happened.
If there’s any secret sauce to what is happening locally, it comes from a cohort of faculty being able to make the decision to take their learning totally online. I made that decision for one of my classes, and what would have been three different sections of socially distanced students in hyflex Group A and Group B complexity (one section of which, y’know, we suddenly didn’t have an adjunct to meet and which was scheduled on top of both chemists’ other teaching responsibilities) became a single group of 55 students being managed online.
Little decisions like that have been made across campus, some decisions for entire faculty teaching loads, other decisions for one major class here or there, and suddenly what was a bustling classroom building on the first day of classes felt like it was on a permanent summer term. The busy-ness of a normal term, inside the classroom buildings, just hasn’t been there.
If we get to the other side of this semester successfully without any major outbreaks of this virus, those little decisions collectively will have played a major role.
I could tell stories about mask compliance, and moments here and there where students haven’t done so well. They’d only be stories here and there. I have stopgap masks in my classroom for students who don’t come in masked up. I haven’t touched them. Classroom compliance has been near 100%. Off campus it’s less, but not unreasonably so. In large measure, I feel like our students are examples for the community that hasn’t taken this virus seriously enough, and where the risk of community spread is ever-present.
The rate of cases in the wider Greene County community has gone down since the Tusculum students returned to campus, not up. We’d reached 100 new cases a week as students returned to campus; with the exception of a couple of days of 30+ cases that caused the data to burst, that rate has gone down to closer to 50-60 per week, which still isn’t good but doesn’t reflect the expected trend. Supermarkets are still stressful places, too many dining rooms are still open in too many restaurants, and there are too many people in the community who complain about a dining room not being open.
Our students, on the whole, have been better citizens of this community than the citizens of this community themselves. If spread of the virus widens across the community, the students shouldn’t be held to account, not when too few people have taken too few steps to arrest the spread ahead of their arrival.
But on campus, things are fine. This is an entirely too mundane report. If you’re expecting drama, move along, there’s none to see. There is no room to be complacent, but things are fine here.
Not great. But not bad. Fine. OK.
Another fine mess. 