How are we supposed to teach in the Plague Years?

Yesterday, I got all my grades turned in, meaning Fall semester is all done…oh, wait, I had to write a bunch of student recommendations and get those sent off. OK, that done, now the semester is behind me, I’m care-free and can go dancing in the streets, or whatever I want for a little while. So what do I do? I opened up my calendar and started planning my schedule for next semester, sketching in lab protocols and exam dates, assembling the information that’ll go into my syllabus. I had some ideas for revising the content/pedagogy of the course, and I wanted to map them out.

It was kind of pointless.

Universities elsewhere (not the University of Minnesota, which will drag its heels to the last moment) are noticing this Omicron variant, and how quickly it may potentially spread, and are scrambling to adjust their schedules, just in case. Four California universities are switching to online only instruction for the first few weeks of the spring term; the University of Washington is going online only for the first week. This is bad news. If you’ve paid any attention at all to university management for the last few years, you’d know that they are always reluctant to adjust to reality, and are never pro-active. If this is what the UW and UC are doing, the situation has to be far worse than anyone is telling.

UM is doing nothing new. Not even a whisper of concern. You’d think, given the fact that our governor and his family just tested positive for COVID-19, that maybe there’d be an alarm bell ringing faintly in some neglected corner of the administration building. For that matter, you’d think Governor Walz might wake up and realize that his lackadaisical, half-assed approach of doing the bare minimum to contain the pandemic wasn’t working, but I don’t expect that to happen, either.

I realized then that next term might be more challenging than I expected, especially since I’m now required to teach all of my classes in-person. Brilliant. Maybe that will change, but I think the faculty and students are now sacrificial lambs laid out on the altar of an optimistic sense of normalcy. It’s all on the shoulders of the faculty to figure out how to flexibly cope with the changing situation.

I made a decision as I was drafting my syllabus. I am required by my employers to be there in Sci 1020, the genetics classroom, but I don’t have to demand that students be there. I’m making attendance optional. I’ll record all my lectures and post them online. Exams will all be take-home. I’ll hold office hours on campus (you better be vaccinated & wearing a mask if you show up in person) and held simultaneously on Zoom.

The lab is a problem. Actually doing the data collection and analysis of independently acquired data is kind of the core purpose of doing a lab, and it’s going to require using on-campus facilities. I have a plan for that, too. The first week of lab will be online: it’s all preparation in basic probability and statistics to get ready for the actual work, and I have exercises in coin-flipping and die-rolling they can do at home. That one is manageable.

Subsequent labs are all about working with flies, and most people would rather not breed thousands of fruit flies in their kitchen. Once again, I am required to teach in-person, so I’ll go in, record myself doing the procedures and showing the students who show up how to do them, and make that available online. Then I’m throwing the lab schedule out the window: the genetics lab will be open from 9am onwards, students will come in when they’ve got available time to do the work on our incubators and microscopes, and I’ll be on call to help out from 9-whenever. That should help spread out attendance. If the university shuts down (I hope the severity of the pandemic isn’t so great that that is necessary), I’ll do the experiments alone, supplemented with class data from previous years, so the students will at least have numbers and phenotypic data to analyze.

It’s going to be a lot of extra work, but I’ll do it. The university administration better be prepared, too: so help me Dog if any of my students die of COVID-19 because of the mandated university environment, I’ll be preparing my letter of resignation and will take my retirement right now, thank you very much. I am so damn tired of irresponsible, incompetent responses to the pandemic, not just from my university, but from every level of government.

My illusory award of two days of vacation

Last week, I mentioned this odd “gesture of appreciation” my university was making to thank us for all our hard work and sacrifices during these pandemic years. We could take two days off in the coming semester. I was baffled…no, I can’t. I’m in a salaried position with daily responsibilities to my students and colleagues — unless you’re telling me that I can send the students home, this is a meaningless, useless gift.

I said as much to one of our administrators, and whoa, I got a straight answer from them. They admitted that “the days off are not as meaningful a gift of time for faculty as for others.” They’re a good thing for staff with regular 9-5 working days, I agree — of course, I suspect that they’ll get eaten up with sick days, or days spent caring for kids who’ve been sent home for school. Then I was told I “can take a day off formally, in the system when you are not teaching”, which is great, except that teaching is something I have to do every day, and is my primary job responsibility. So basically this is a promise of a little extra free time that I’m not allowed to take, but hey, the administration at the Twin Cities campus gets to feel good about doing a little something which is actually nothing.

I suspect some out of touch bright MBA in the marble halls of the central administration wracked their brains really hard to come up with a sop to the workers that would look really good on paper to outsiders, yet wouldn’t cost the university a penny.

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Who is doing the silencing?

Oh dear. Those poor authors of that dreadful argument for bad policy, the Great Barrington Declaration, are complaining that they’re being silenced. You know where this is going, right?

In fact, these individuals are rather omnipresent figures in the COVID-19 media landscape. They have been on many large podcasts. They have given many TV interviews. They have been interviewed by and written many editorials in large newspapers. They’ve been profiled by the New York Times and Medpage Today. They have a large presence on social media. They have made a truly remarkable number of YouTube videos (Dr. Jay Bahattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Marin Kulldorff), some of which have been seen by millions of people. They have testified before Congress and in courts regarding COVID-19 policy. Some have gained new funding sources or found new employment in right-wing think tanks. They’ve met with and influenced powerful politicians, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. They held a “medical experts roundtable” at President Trump’s White House. Dr. Gupta met with and influenced UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Journalists rightly say the’ve become “famous voices” this pandemic.

Please, don’t hurt them any more. Poor babies.

You know who’s actually getting silenced? Nebraska.

Nebraska plans to stop reporting coronavirus numbers online after Wednesday.

The state Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday that it plans to retire the online dashboard that it has used to report statistics on the coronavirus pandemic for more than a year. The current state virus emergency is also set to expire on Wednesday, and along with that Nebraska is eliminating the last few social distancing guidelines that remained in place.

It’s OK. Don’t you know the pandemic is over?

The state also said that 48.2% of Nebraska’s population has now been vaccinated against the coronavirus. The pace of vaccinations has slowed significantly since April

Over the past two weeks, the seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in Nebraska has risen from 29 new cases per day on June 14 to 43 new cases per day on Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Yes! Grades done!

Fall Semester 2021 is done, except for the inevitable stress of dealing with unhappy students complaining about their grades — I’ve already got two of those, I’m sure more will be coming.

So what next? How should I celebrate? I’m kind of at a loss here, with my poor narrowly strictured brain turning immediately to thoughts of getting started preparing for next term, but there must be something better to do.

I guess I could put up our Xmas tree, but it seems a little bit pointless. We’re not doing anything for the holiday, not getting together with other family, no social events, nothing. I’m tentatively penciling in watching the The Muppet Christmas Carol with my wife on Xmas eve, if she approves. Is that festive enough? Because otherwise, I’m not feeling it.

Tell me he’s doing a bit. It’s a bit, right?

John Cleese wishes to register a complaint (see? It must be an old Monty Python routine). He is complaining to the BBC that, in a recent interview, he came off sounding “old-fashioned, uncaring and basically harmful”.

In other words, the BBC was dead-on accurate. Given the BBC’s recent record on these matters, that is surprising.

Cleese’s comedic routine is rather rusty, though, since he stomped out in a huff at being asked questions on subjects he’s been shouting about lately, like cancel culture and trans rights. He only wants to talk about those things when he’s the only voice, and the interviewer is only a stenographer.

Cleese then removed his headphones, as it was “not the interview I had agreed to,” he noted.

“Karishma had no interest in a discussion with me. She wanted only the role of prosecutor. The BBC needs to train her again.”

He had only “agreed to” a fluff piece, I guess. Oh, for the days when media interviews were challenging and interesting and put people on the spot…

Don’t die for me!

This is an actual exchange between an Amazon delivery driver and dispatch during the recent catastrophic weather.

7:08 p.m.

Driver: Radio’s been going off.

Dispatch: OK. Just keep driving. We can’t just call people back for a warning unless Amazon tells us to do so.

Driver: Just relaying in case y’all didn’t hear it over there.

7:40 p.m.

Driver: Tornado alarms are going off over here.

Dispatch: Just keep delivering for now. We have to wait for word from Amazon. If we need to bring people back, the decision will ultimately be up to them. I will let you know if the situation changes at all. I’m talking with them now about it.

Driver: How about for my own personal safety, I’m going to head back. Having alarms going off next to me and nothing but locked building around me isn’t sheltering in place. That’s wanting to turn this van into a casket. Hour left of delivery time. And if you look at the radar, the worst of the storm is going to be right on top of me in 30 minutes.

Driver: It was actual sirens.

Dispatch: “If you decided to come back, that choice is yours. But I can tell you it won’t be viewed as for your own safety. The safest practice is to stay exactly where you are. If you decide to return with your packages, it will be viewed as you refusing your route, which will ultimately end with you not having a job come tomorrow morning. The sirens are just a warning.

Driver: I’m literally stuck in this damn van without a safe place to go with a tornado on the ground.

Dispatch: Amazon is saying shelter in place.

Dispatch: I will know when they say anything else to me.

Dispatch: [Driver name] you need to shelter in place. The wind just came through the warehouse and ripped the rts door and broke it so even if you got back here, you can’t get in the building. You need to stop and shelter in place.

Driver: Okay.

Isn’t it curious that the US Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, is a corrupt Republican who has been slowing down mail delivery, while corporations like Amazon are cracking the whip and compelling their workers to risk their lives to get packages shipped faster and faster?

Here’s the deal: nothing I ever order from Amazon is so time-critical that I’ll get upset if it’s a day or two or three late. Next-day delivery is not a big issue to me — I’m not ordering live organs and human tissue, ever. At least not yet. I don’t want any drivers to die so I can get a rush of gratification.

There’s a reason Minnesotans don’t wear sandals in Winter

I’m still required to wear backless shoes as I recover from Achilles tendinitis, and the only such shoes I have are a pair of sandals. I also still have to take a very short walk to the lab to take care of spiders and flies. Today, while wearing my heaviest, warmest socks and making only a short shuffle from parking lot to science building, I discovered that this combo, despite being awesomely stylish, provides no protection for one’s toes on even a mild Minnesota winter day.

Said toes are now snorgled down in a hot heating pack. You could get frostbite really quickly out there if you aren’t properly prepared!

We weathered that weather just fine

We had a night of howling window-rattling, but that was the worst of it. We dropped from 4°C to -12°C overnight and acquired a thin layer of snow — hard to tell how much because the wind scoured it off of exposed surfaces. We are on the northern edge of the big storm that ripped through the midwest, so we still have power and all that good stuff — Iowa, SE Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan suffered far worse.

So, I selfishly wonder, will my flies arrive safely at the lab today? That’s the real test.