Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, June 25, 2020

Teaching

Still don't like teaching online, but I'm not liking it less now than I was not liking it before. Highly engaged students are still engaging as they were, tho' I need to figure out new strategies to keep everybody on board... assuming this is something I'll get a chance to do more of anytime soon. However alienating online teaching can be, I do find utterly chilling the university plans for Fall re-openings without a vaccine or a viable system of contact testing or even a robust set of masking norms being enforced (even informally!) in this country, even in comparatively saner California. It seems to me administrators are typically prioritizing what they see as "institutional" survival over student and staff survival (no, it doesn't make sense) and major bailouts of the public school sector are going to have to be forthcoming in the aftermath of all this... I say this as someone whose school closed and who has been laid off from my teaching jobs (the Rona was at least the context if not the pretext for these decisions) and has no real sense of what comes next for me personally, but I do feel pretty sure, come what may, that schools will NOT really be re-opening or hybrid-opening or whatever they are telling themselves they're planning for now. Cases and deaths are rising, the US failed to contain its first wave, let alone the beginnings of the second wave coming in the fall. Teaching is still happening for now, but it really feels as if... school's out.

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