True, but this is the college thread.
In person classes are a basic and desired part of the college experience for many, plus the average professor has no idea how to be an effective online teacher. If a student wants remote learning, they should attend a school where that online instruction is the focus, and represents the best demonstrated practice of that modality…ASU, Western Governor’s, SNHU, etc.
Excellent advice. I just wonder if professors view themselves as white collar workers rather than essential in person service providers.
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Excellent point. Many “white collar workers” are not in person. Must professors be in person to effectively teach? Should they be awarded hazard pay and life insurance?
If the professor is distanced and is wearing a high quality mask, maybe even behind plexiglass, the risk of infection is not high.
If remote teaching is what they want to do, that’s great. There are many colleges where that is a relatively common offering. If they are teaching at a school where it’s not the typical offering hopefully the students have the choice whether or not to take a remote class.
There are article that indicate the plexiglas shields may do more harm than good in how they disrupt airflow RE viruses. I have not read anything that says if you have multiple conditions making you especially vulnerable that being well-masked in a room with 175 others is ok.
People in those occupations are the ones with the highest covid death rates.
They don’t complain because they can’t, they need the jobs for their living.
As always, the poor are dying while serving the privileged. It’s not them who should sacrifice themselves for society to function, we should spend the money to provide the resources to keep them safe.
Isn’t the point that at a college the janitors and food service workers bear those (or greater) risks? You don’t go and live on a college campus just to take online classes.
Given the frequent complaints about how there are far too few jobs available in academia, it doesn’t seem like mass retirements of older professors would be a worse outcome (after the initial disruption) than continuing indefinitely with online classes.
If online instruction even after vaccination was to become normalized then I think there will have to be a wholesale restructuring of college education with many more job losses amongst both professors and support staff.
I agree. And if online instruction does become more common/normalize (and hundreds of thousands of students are already attending the aforementioned purveyors of that modality), students will gravitate to those experienced providers. The tuition at those schools has the added benefit of generally being relatively lower too.
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I think colleges should require masking indoors and mandate vaccination for all faculty, students and staff. Moreover, faculty, like your child, who suffer from health conditions should be exempt from teaching in-person. At the same time, I understand the frustration of vaccinated students (and their parents) when classes that were supposed to be in-person are suddenly going remote (once tuition payments have been collected, of course) because, frankly, it’s a bit of a bait and switch. If schools can’t offer in-person instruction they need to be up front about it so parents/students can make an informed decision about their education.
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Your school might be, but some schools have not been. My comments about colleges are meant generally, not specific to any particular school. I’ve got a good friend whose child has just been informed 2 more of her classes will be going remote - information they would have liked to have before choosing them. If most course offerings are going to be remote and the school is up front about it - fine - people know what they have signed up for. If, on the other hand, information about in-person v. remote teaching has trickled out after the fact, that is another story.
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My niece has only online classes at our instate U this year. My brother says she just stays in her room at home, alone. He works at his office, younger sister is in person at private school and her mom teaches in person at public grade school. Brother said she’ll soon (maybe next year), be going to do a term or year abroad. The transition will be pretty huge from virtual to going abroad.
Of course these policies affect staff people who, by and large, don’t have the luxury of being remote like their white collar counterparts. As to waiting COVID out, I don’t think that is a realistic strategy. I don’t think we are going to stamp out COVID - we are going to have to learn to live with it. I’d love to be wrong, but that is how I see it.
This is what confuses me. What does it mean for COVID to be “over”? Why will things be any better in a year’s time? Vaccinations certainly help prevent serious illness amongst the vast majority of people but we are never going back to zero COVID.
When this pandemic started the idea was that if we could flatten the curve of hospital admissions, then we could get back to normal. In highly vaccinated parts of the US we’ve already flattened the curve (in the sense of only having a level of hospitalizations that doesn’t fill up the ICU beds and is much lower than earlier in the year).
How many people are going to lock themselves away for the rest of their lives, because they are at “high risk”? I think most people are likely to just acknowledge that life is now more dangerous and get on with it. Sadly some people think that they can do that even if unvaccinated. But even in our highly vaccinated community we are doing far more than we would have done last year in terms of meeting friends, traveling, going to sports games, etc.
COVID will never be over. It may become endemic like flu.
I’m far from a defender of college administrations, but many, if not most, colleges have done as much as they could under the circumstances. Practically no one wants another year of remote college learning. However, no one, including the colleges, can guarantee in-person learning if COVID breaks out on campuses. The ones we’ve already heard about since the start of the fall semester were all due to discretinary actions by some of the students. We, as parents, can’t blame the colleges for these breakouts and subsequent remote classes simply because we paid tuitions. We have to remind our kids that this isn’t going a normal semester and they have resposibilities to refrain from certain activiities. Failure to take the virus seriously will likely jeopardize the whole semester and more.