The NHL has also had great success with its bubble. But even if students at a school agreed to be in a bubble, the faculty and staff never signed up for three months isolated from family, and it’s preposterous to imagine they should.
It’s one thing to agree to be in a bubble in exchange for millions of dollars and a chance to have your name engraved on the Stanley Cup, and quite another to bubble to be able to teach Party McHearty about the subjunctive voice.
@alwaysmoving that thread is required reading about the reasons why Covid is just the coup de grace in a long line of blows to higher ed. Bret Devereaux points out, correctly, that virtually none of the explosion in tuition and fees is going to those who actually teach students. I sometimes get buttonholed by people who think that professors are rolling around in vaults throwing cash overhead and blame us for the exorbitant cost of their kid’s college. They want me to answer for it. But if the college their kid attends got rid of all the student services, residential life services, armies of associate vice provosts and assistant deans, and layers of regulation compliance bureaucracy, they’d complain about that too. The long slow shift in higher ed funding from state support to private debt is also a major problem and that crisis has come to a head.
I know college costs too much, but it’s not because professors cost too much.
College living as a “hospital unit” will definitely be the norm for this and next year until a vaccine is widely available. For most students who cannot afford to take a gap year, they seem to prefer the “hospital unit” with some in person classes than being entirely remote. Ultimately, having access to in person teaching as well as being away from home has the benefit of allowing for an academic environment for those that are really focused on academics. It is pretty clear that zoom classes are not optimal.
Here is a longer article that references the message from the Head of Silliman College.
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/08/18/school-of-public-health-study-says-students-may-be-able-to-safely-return-to-campus/?fbclid=IwAR1VkOTbK4P7nmJSdW2njUUzfbW5vGmwiUcFW9hcy4b6xgqwaMTf6FoWhro
On-campus students at Yale will be fairly locked down for the first 14 days.
Negative pre-arrival test, tested upon arrival before receiving key, confined to own room for 24-36 hours awaiting test result, then allowed to roam within student’s own residential college for first 14 days. Approx 150 students per residential college, so 14 small bubbles.
All students, on and off-campus, will be tested 2x/week. Once the 14 day residential college quarantine is lifted, students are free to wander the rest of campus and New Haven. There will be 1900 on campus & 1600 off-campus this fall. This plan could fail, but it may take a bit longer than other places due to the frequent testing and 14 day quarantine.
However, students have to be aware that if they do get COVID-19 and have to go into the quarantine dorm, the experience would basically lose all advantages of being on campus – no in-person classes, no social contact with other people, no leaving the room*, and the quarantine dorm is probably the least desirable housing the campus has (as the student at University of Iowa found out).
*In theory, going outside keeping distance from others would not be risky to others, but a college or local government making the rules on quarantine is unlikely to trust that those who should quarantine will exercise good judgment on this matter.
This is the critical point of success. All the colleges clearly understand that…but the kids…not so much. One wonders whether lots of testing can overcome and/or counterbalance the rule breakers.
“The long-term success of Yale’s plans to avert an outbreak hinges on whether students adhere to the school’s “community compact.” Before returning to campus, undergraduates must sign onto the document, pledging to wear masks and follow group gathering protocols.”
@homerdog - so if its a good trend, it can’t be trusted? I have a son there. He is not seeing a large number of cases who can’t be tested. We are back to the lowest level of evidence, observational data and heresay. I trust the numbers until there is clear evidence that they are not trustworthy.
I tend to agree with you on the punishment angle. I understand that they want to get the best contact tracing possible, therefore those who are named will not be punished. I am still pretty mad at a group of Finance Bros decided the rules did not apply to them and they were going to party anyway. I am sure there were some uncomfortable calls to parents. It is my hope that they were given a warning - you got a pass this time, if it happens again, you are gone.
I just think ND is missing so many cases. If they are not testing asymptomatic students and staff then they aren’t doing enough. And anyone who wants a test certainly needs to be able to get one asap and that’s not what our neighbors’ kids are seeing. Believe me, I want it to work for ND and for all schools but I just cannot see how, without testing all kids somehow on a regular basis, there won’t be breakout after breakout. It only takes one to start a spike.
@waverlywizzard They are still having in-person classes at UMass; none of the classes’ instructional methods changed. They just limited campus housing and access to campus facilities to those who are either taking an in-person classes or have unique circumstances.
Good trend? The latest round of testing showed 12% positive. If they’re seeing 12% positive, they’re not finding all the cases. If they’re not finding all the cases, those people are infecting other people. This is a good trend… for the virus, but a bad trend for Team Us.
Having spoken with a number of close college friends this week whose children are current ND students (some very close to the situation that has evolved)- along with info I’ve read on closed social media groups for alum - I am hearing the same info you are, and I had expected the #'s to start dropping by early next week based on the specifics of what had transpired. I too will watch to see what evidence comes about that might conflict with the personal accounts shared with me.
The posts here about ND make me think some who speculate know very little about the school and it’s culture…even just how the housing part of it influences behavior (single sex dorms, parietals, dorm-centric friendships due to living in the same dorm for 3+ years, etc.). On a positive note, seeing speculation thrown around as fact has made me far more conscious of not jumping to conclusions myself about what other schools’ current situations will mean for their longer term success in educating students during a pandemic when I don’t know yet what factors specific to those schools may increase/decrease their risk profiles as the semester progresses. So I need to keep watching and looking for data. Thank you posters for sharing your first hand accounts of what’s transpiring at your students’ schools, within in certain geographic areas, etc. and/or your perspective as college employees- it is very helpful, and I think I can provide better advice to my college and high school kids as they plan for the semesters beyond this one because of such insights shared here.
In-person teaching this fall will look nothing like what it has been, is the problem. It’s hard to get a good discussion or Socratic dialogue going when everyone is six feet apart, wearing masks, and facing the front of the room where the masked instructor is behind a plexiglas shield. Zoom classes aren’t optimal, true, but there is nothing optimal about this fall. The other thing is that if everyone is getting sick and dropping like flies, a class can’t progress. At least a student recovering, or in quarantine, can participate in a Zoom class.
In Zoom I can use polls, students can “raise their hand,” and I can assign small-group discussions in breakout rooms. No, it’s not as good as a regular in-person class, but it’s preferable to what I can do in-person if I’m at all following the Covid rules in place on my campus.
Interesting all of my children hate zoom the most. This is 2 on the college level and 1 high school last year. They prefer the prerecorded lecture to zoom and zoom is their absolute last choice. Unfortunately many professors are not willing to prerecord their lectures.
Worse yet, classes that are supposed to accommodate both f2f and remote students simultaneously are going to produce an experience that is satisfying for exactly no one. Socratic discussion? Not helpful when the remote students will be unable to hear anyone except for the instructor. Writing something on the board? Remote students likely won’t have a clear view of it. Walking around the lecture hall so you can connect with the students sitting there? Who is keeping an eye on what’s happening with the remote students (raising hand, for example)?
This is what my k-12 district is about to find out. ?
My D uses blackboard and in the spring it seemed to work pretty good. They were able to break out into small groups.
K-12 is going to be a disaster if it is fully in person or hybrid. We are better off going fully remote and setting families up with the technology and childcare that they need. Live teaching will not be sustainable and the quality of education will be greatly reduced, sadly.
For starters, teachers will never be able to project their voice for so many hours in a mask and face shield.
This is exactly why our high school won’t live stream class if we switch to hybrid. On any given day, some kids will be in class and some at home but only the kids in class that day will get the lecture. Kids at home that day will be either doing work on their own or logging into zoom to do group work with classmates.
And my nephew’s lease was for the entire amount - $48k. There were 5 guys who signed it, 5 parents who signed it, and they were all responsible for ALL of it. My sister asked me to review the lease and I was shocked at how much they were all guarantying to pay. There was also a $7k deposit (and I told her they’d never see that again as it was already required for the re-keying the unit, cleaning, snow removal).
He signed it in Oct for the next year. This house had 3 large apartments (the $48k was for the basement) so this landlord was getting $150-160k for this house every year, plus whatever he could skim off the deposits. No one was getting out of the lease, and if someone bailed, he also bailed on his friends.
Sigh. This is a pipe dream " setting families up with the technology and childcare that they need. " Completely unrealistic. Never happening. If elementary schools are all remote, it will be a lost year.
This country is HUGE. These one size fits all ideas don’t work with Covid. In rural eastern PA there could be almost no cases, and in greater Houston there could be tons. The school systems in those areas should open schools based on what’s going on IN THEIR AREA.
Except now there’s a laptop shortage, too.