Pandemic Pedagogy: Week Eight

Somehow it's the eighth week of the semester already, meaning we're over halfway through. (Here at UT this semester at least, we're running fourteen weeks of instruction, though the last week is just the two days of Thanksgiving week.)

This is the point where you begin to get a feel, I think, for what works and what doesn't-- but it's also the point where I feel locked in no matter what. I know other instructors pride themselves on their ability to be adaptable on the fly, but I hate make any substantive changes to class during the semester; I'd much rather be locked into a bad plan than try to come up with a new plan and implement it midstream.

As I've said here before, we're "hybrid." Administration wants as many students in the classroom as can happen with social distancing, and they want things to be as synchronous as possible. I can accommodate eleven students in the classroom at a time. But we also have to work with students who are fully remote (I have one student in Turkey and another in Peru), and students who can't come to class any given week because they tested positive for coronavirus or their roommate did. I don't like the idea of livestreaming the classroom experience (sounds awful), so I do it like this:

• MONDAY: All students attend class over Zoom (I teach from home).
• They usually have "prework" for the Monday Zoom sessions.
  
• WEDNESDAY: Half of the students attend class in person.
• There is prework for this.
• FRIDAY: The other half of students attend class; I reteach the same material I taught Wednesday.
• SATURDAY: They have "weekly work" due; this is often meant to take the place of the "missing" day.
• Additionally, if they didn't attend Wednesday/Friday, they have some kind of "alternative" replacement assignment that is due, too.

It's okay but it could be better. Making the work due on Saturdays was meant to give them maximum flexibility in deciding when to get it done. But I think this results in them doing a lot of work at the last minute on Saturday (or not at all). It also gives me too much temptation to introduce stuff in a Friday class that I intend them to use in an assignment due on Saturday, which means my encouragements to work ahead within a given week are kind of meaningless!

We've got the same format in the spring, so I will have to tweak it to make it work. I think I will go back to a more traditional M/W/F format for homework like we're in a "normal" semester. Something like:

• MONDAY: All students attend class over Zoom.
• Homework is due by the time of class.
• WEDNESDAY: Half of students attend class in person.
• Homework for all students is due by the time of class.
• FRIDAY: Other half of students attend class in person.
• The work for the "missing day" is due-- perhaps at 11:59pm since it won't be tied to a particular class session.

I suspect this will be a little confusing, but I also suspect that anything I do in the current circumstances will be a little confusing. I need to figure out a way to make the class Blackboard site more navigable; right now I do folders for each week, with a subfolder for each day. This works well if you are keeping up, I think, but becomes a nightmare if you fall behind. You can see in "My Grades" you haven't done the Quiz on Paraphrasing, but in what folder and subfolder is the Quiz on Paraphrasing? I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is, though, because it seems to me that having all assignments in one kind of common area would be overwhelming, too.

The other thing is that my "weekly work" has been kind of minimal. This was by design: I know from last semester that you have to be less ambitious in what you cover when it is being covered outside of class. Activities that move quickly in class with you there take students forever when you are not. But I think I swerved too much in the other direction, and there is content I just don't have the time to deliver! I am grading annotated bibliographies right now, and though I will say that is always a tricky assignment for my students, the quality this semester is much lower than in the past. (Not for everyone, but definitely for the students who are less able to handle work that is more self-directed.)

The spring will be strange, though, because we will have no spring break. Instead there will be four reading days across the course of the semester, and three of them are on Fridays, meaning I will have to work around that in my attempt to impose some kind of regular pattern on the class!