The challenges of suddenly teaching online

Now that classes in schools and colleges are being shut down, faculty have been asked to shift to teaching online. In my former life heading a teaching center at a research university, I know that teaching online is not easy and to do it well requires a lot of preparation and help from online course designers. Many faculty are reluctant to try online teaching for a variety of reason. Some feel that there is positive dynamic in face-to-face interactions that gets lost when mediated by technology. Others are simply technophobes who worry that they will mess things up and not know how to recover. Some faculty at research universities like mine are unwilling to expend the time because research takes priority and there is simply no great benefit to it. And finally some faculty simply don’t care. They long ago stopped putting any effort into improving their teaching and see no reason to start now.
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Samantha Bee’s show is back on the air

She is putting on her show from a remote location, using her family as her video crew. She points out that 70% of the labor force does not have the option of working from home and have little savings. One in three Americans say that they or an immediate family member has lost their job because of the pandemic measures and more than half report a cut in pay or work hours. Many are going to be seriously hurt by the social distancing and shut down protocols and will need immediate relief measures, like this couple in Kansas City.
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Jordan Klepper talks to Trump supporters

During the 2016 election, the very funny Jordan Klepper produced some excellent pieces for The daily Show talking to Trump supporters at his rallies. He then left the show but is back as a correspondent to once again cover Trump’s 2020 election campaign rallies. Below is a montage of him talking to Trump supporters at his rallies from the 2016 campaign and this year. Klepper is clean-shaven in 2016 and bearded now.

John Oliver on India’s Narendra Modi

On his show Last Week Tonight a month ago, John Oliver took the opportunity of Donald Trump’s visit to India to give us an in-depth look at what its prime minister Narendra Modi is doing. Trump seems to like Modi a lot and even called him the ‘father of India’ which should alert anyone that Modi is bad news, since Trump loves divisive authoritarians.

Calling Modi the father of India is an outright insult to the memory of the highly admired Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, people who were key players in India’s independence struggle against the British and were strong believers in creating a secular India that would enable the unification of the highly diverse ethnic and religious elements that make up that nation, whereas Modi is a divisive Hindu nationalist whose party seems to have a virulent hatred of Muslims.

Verdi’s Il Trovatore

This third opera in the series from the New York Metropolitan Opera that I watched yesterday was of a 2015 livestream. It was a little different from the other two. For one thing, it had more set pieces where a performer sang a solo uninterrupted, allowing them to really show their virtuoso skills. The female lead playing Leonora had plenty of occasions to sing what I typically think of as occurring in opera where a soprano holds apocryphally glass-shattering high notes for a long time with a kind of rapid up and down tremolo effect (I am sure there is an operatic term for it.)
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John Oliver on the coronavirus

It turns out that the building that his studio and offices are in has been shut down because some people tested positive for the virus and so he had to tape this week’s show in a different room without an audience. He has good advice for people about what sources of information to trust about the virus and what to do (Infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC) and what not to trust (Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh) and not to pass on unverified information on social media. Jane Lytvynenko is maintaining a running link of all the fake stories that are circulating on the internet.
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