Feeling rather doomy, but the spider did cheer me up

Sweet dreams.

I didn’t have any such dreams — I could barely sleep last night. Today classes resume, and what I feel is mainly dread, as if this were the day of my execution. We shouldn’t be teaching in-person right now, for one thing. For another, I’m completely revising my approach to the class, because I have to be flexible to changing circumstances, and I have to be prepared to teach students who may have to periodically go into isolation. That means I have to write all new lectures, all semester long. For one more, I have lost all confidence in the university as a place I can trust to support me or my students.

And now I’m tired.

Right now I’m just writing on the walls of my jail cell…and being melodramatic. Everything will be fine, I tell myself, and it probably will be. It’s just going to be hard to get out there and act (teaching is show biz, you know) cheerful and enthusiastic while not feeling that way at all.

Teachers who won’t heed basic health requirements deserve to be fired

The public school district in Willmar had to put 11 employees on leave when they refused to comply with some simple rules.

The policy gave staff three options:

  1. Provide proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
  2. Wear a mask at work beginning Jan. 10 and submit to weekly COVID-19 testing beginning Feb. 9.
  3. Meet with Human Resources about possible medical or religious exemptions.

They had so many outs! I rather resent the last one — praying does not deter a virus — but they couldn’t even meet those minimal requirements.

The shocking bit, though, is that some of them were teachers.

“There were eleven staff members placed on leave on Tuesday. Some of them were teachers, others were hourly employees,” Superintendent Dr. Jeff Holm wrote in an email to Bring Me The News, noting that the employees placed on leave “opted not to comply with any of the options.”

Holm said that the school board approved the policy to begin Jan. 10 and that employees were give “ample notice” of their three options. Holm added that the district was warned about possible “substantial financial penalties for non-compliant employees.”

It’s been reported elsewhere that one employee refused to leave and was escorted out of the building by a supervisor, but Holm confirmed to BMTN that the employee who was “escorted” out had requested that of their supervisor.

The 11 who have been placed on leave represent a tiny fraction of the district’s estimated 800 employees.

Don’t put these people on leave, fire them. The silver lining here is that this rule has exposed a tiny group of intransigent incompetents who don’t deserve to be employed as educators.

Willmar, by the way, is about an hour’s drive from where I live, and while it’s still rural, it’s not filled with yokels — Ridgewater Community College has a campus there.

Thanks I hate it

There was a time when I could walk into a classroom, plug my laptop into a cable to the video projector, and run my Keynote/Powerpoint presentation with a minimum of fuss. No more.

Since I have classes in two days, I went into my classroom to test out all the technology. The old ways no longer work. Instead, I have to log in to the classroom projector and tell it which input to use. Then I have to log in to zoom twice, once to get on my university account, then again to link up to zoom. Then I have to use an iPad at the front of the room to inform it to let zoom know I’m doing a lecture. I fire up my presentation software, tell zoom which window I’m using, and then I’m off! No, not quite. When I start, I have to click on a button on the iPad to let it know to start recording, at which time it asks for my email address.

Then, finally, I can turn to the students, hoping that the signals are all properly configured and we’ll be able to do some genetics.

Once the hour is up, I click on a “stop recording” button, at which time zoom plays with all the data and sends it to me by email, where I can download the images from my presentation (which I already have, in higher quality), the output from an awkwardly placed camera on the ceiling, and a horrible muddy audio recording that sounds like something broadcast from beneath the sea.

I’m going to contact the IT department this week and see if they can’t show me something simple and elegant that doesn’t require me to show up 15 minutes before class starts to jump through stupid digital hoops in order to do my job. I have little hope that that will happen.

I could just show up to class with my own video projector and a GoPro and be up and running in two minutes, with everything functioning more reliably. I am strongly tempted to do just that.

I’m also prepared to just throw out all the tech and teach naked with a whiteboard and a black dry erase marker. It might be easier.

Another small sacrifice to the pandemic gods

I have to start teaching in-person on Tuesday, and I’ve laid in a supply of N94 and N95 masks in my office, which now leads to an unfortunate consequence: to fit well, the beard had to go. I shaved it off yesterday.

This is horrible. I have relied on that beard to hide half my homely face for decades now, and suddenly I’m naked and exposed. At least when I’m out and about I get to cover it with a big mask, which helps. But worse, I’m used to having a face covered with the downy soft fur of a kitten, a pleasant tactile sensation. This morning I woke up with a sandpaper face. Coarse sandpaper. Something I could use to strip corrosion off of rusted iron girders. I just shaved again (I have to do this every day now?) ten minutes ago and it just feels like I’ve switch to a finer grit.

How do you clean-shaven men bear it? When did our culture decide this barbarous custom of shearing off our soothing soft pelts was de rigueur? I’m feeling oppressed already. This is sex based discrimination! I have to carry the burden of artificial depilation now, just to keep this stupid virus away from my respiratory system.

Also, I’d forgotten what my chin looked like. I really didn’t miss it.

A tempting offer

Do you feel like moving to Minnesota? The town of Middle River has an offer for you!

Attention waterfowl hunters who dream about moving closer to marshlands north and west. The goose capital of Minnesota will award you seven-tenths of an acre inside its city limits if you move there and build a house.

That’s right: Zero down, zero interest and zero payments on a roomy 100-by-300-foot lot in Middle River, a town of 300 people set between Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge and the state’s well-known Thief Lake Wildlife Management Area. That’s a combined 182 square miles of breeding grounds and habitat for ducks, geese, shorebirds, song birds, raptors, deer, bear, wild turkeys, grouse, wolves and more.

The incentives don’t stop there. Under the civic growth program launched in 2018 and expanded last year, the welcome packet sponsored by this outdoors-minded community also includes a one-year membership to the local Sportsmen’s Club, a free building permit, two free years of municipal water and sewer, free electric hookup, three months of free cable TV, a $100 gift certificate to the local tavern, and a free, 12-month subscription to The Honker, the community’s newspaper.

Free land? Free beer at the local (and probably only) tavern? How can you turn that down?

It’s only 340km (200 miles) due north of Morris, and the current temperature is a balmy -15°C. They don’t mention it, but there’s probably good ice fishing up there. It’s almost Canada!

I have an idea: let’s do whatever South Korea does

They sure seem to do something right. I haven’t seen any evidence that their economy has been significantly harmed, either.

My daughter-in-law Ji and grandson Knut are currently stuck in Korea — passport issues for a four-year-old and tight control over travel — and I don’t know, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be trapped in a country with an effective government and rational health care. They also seem to have sound childcare policies.

The bad news is that his father is stuck in Fort Lewis, Washington, apart from his family.

If I have to call him Prince, how about Prince Kiddy-Diddler?

Prince Andrew has been stripped of all of his honors and titles by the queen of England, as Mano tells us. Apparently, though, we’re supposed to still call the royal pedophile “Prince”? I just want to call him officially a commoner, for now, and eventually, convict.

Hey! Remember the worst royal scandal in 85 years? Darned uppity black woman daring to accuse royalty of racism…that was big news in the tabloids, while Randy Andy frolicking with a convicted pedophile was something to forgive and forget.

That was what, about 2 years ago? The scandals are accelerating.

Good thing I don’t believe in prophetic dreams!

It’s too bad I don’t have a therapist, because we could have a lot of fun with this dream.

It wasn’t much. I dreamt that the omega variant had come along, there was mass death everywhere, including my wife and I. Our floppy, decaying bodies were flung into a mass grave, and then her corpse rolled away from mine and we were separated by piles of dead strangers. The end. That’s when I woke up at 4am deep in the slough of despond and have spent the day stumbling through a grey world.

Anyway, I need to take some time off. Classes start on Tuesday, and ain’t nothin’ gonna stop them.

Well, other than death.

Time to breathe

I’ve got everything done for the first week of classes. Lecture prepped, lab instructions posted, flies flourishing, syllabus done, first problem set written and posted, everything. Everything!

Now savoring the moment. This is probably the very last time I’ll be all caught up until May. I’d do something to celebrate except there’s a pandemic and I’m on an Only Bad Food diet and most of the spiders are frozen and the whole world sucks.

I have far more respect for students than I do for school administrators

It gives me some hope for the future, it does. Students are leading the way and walking out of NY schools.

Students at several high schools in New York City coordinated a walkout from classes on Tuesday to call for remote learning as they protest what they say are unsafe learning conditions inside school buildings as COVID cases surged just as the spring semester began last week.

A campaign mounted by students and activists across some of New York’s best-known high schools – including Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant – led to a walkout shortly before noon on Tuesday.

While precise numbers were not immediately available, organizers estimated hundreds of students participated, with about 400 students walking out at Brooklyn Tech alone.

Those are smart students.

I’ve been busy revamping my upcoming genetics course for that kind of eventuality. I’m less concerned about the administration putting us in lockdown (if that happens, it means students are dropping dead in the hallways), or about a mass walkout by the students, than I am with individual students having to drop out for a few days or weeks at a time to deal with their own illness, or family emergencies. I know that’s going to happen. It happened last semester, it happened last year. It’s going to happen some more this spring. So I’m putting a lot of work into revising the course to incorporate more flexibility.

There’s a limit to how much flexibility I can program in, though. There is a breaking point where I’ll be the one walking out.