In part because parents do have to work and in part out of concern for their children’s mental health, families across the country are building “schooling pods” for their kids, wherein a few families allow their children to meet in alternating houses for school or homework each day. It makes sense. It provides needed contact with other kids and a chance to pool resources. At the same time, it does present a Covid risk and it assumes that each parent has the ability to be a schoolteacher. Another colleague of mine, who has a son in middle school, confessed that the pod at his house has evolved into a full Dungeons & Dragons campaign in part because he has to be in the other room working and in part because their internet connection went down. No one is quite sure what schoolwork is getting done, and because all the parents work full time, no one can monitor it much.

A debate rages on the internet and on parent forums over whether or not to send our children to school when they open in five weeks. Neither decision is ideal. Either you send your child to school where they can have structured class time, contact with friends, a much-needed sense of normalcy, and a real chance of contracting Covid-19 and bringing it home with them. Or, you keep your child at home for the entire semester whey they and your family are kept safe from the virus, where you or your spouse cannot go to work, where your child continues to receive sketchy online instruction and suffers from the searing isolation that can only come from watching their friends have a social life.

My own teaching has also required a careful reckoning with the Nirvana fallacy. The University of Alabama has decided to reopen with students on campus this semester. They have also elected not to postpone or cancel the football season, as other prestigious programs have. The financial pull just feels too strong. Prior to coming to campus, each student must show a negative COVID test, but there is little way that they control its spread, given that the school does not exist in a bubble and that false-negative test results are common.

On the one hand, this is infuriating. In the first few days after opening the campus, students posted photographs of each other neither wearing masks nor standing six feet apart. Several warnings from the university president and other officials made little difference. The university has not disclosed its Covid numbers to the faculty. And the number of tests given—supposedly in the tens of thousands—has been kept off the Alabama Department of Public Health’s count for either the county or the state. The reported number of infections was so high in the first week of school that the University of Alabama became national news as a case study for the country.[2] Unlike University of North Carolina, which switched its courses to full-online after less than 150 cases, the University of Alabama continues full-steam ahead with hundreds of cases each week and entire dorms being cleared in order to quarantine the growing number of students with COVID.[3]

Notes

[1] H. L. and Evolving Ed, “Defining the Teacher’s Role in Hybrid Education,” Schoology Exchange (blog), September 4, 2020, https://www.schoology.com/blog/defining-teacher%E2%80%99s-role-hybrid-education.

[2] Michael Casagrande, “UA Counts More than 500 Confirmed COVID-19 Cases,” AL.com, August 24, 2020, https://www.al.com/news/2020/08/university-of-alabama-reports-more-than-500-confirmed-covid-19-cases.html.

[3] Juliana Kaplan, Allana Akhtar, and Taylor Borden, “How the University of North Carolina Went from a Leader in College Reopenings to What the Student Paper Called a ‘clusterf—’ with 135 Coronavirus Cases in Just 7 Days,” Business Insider, August 24, 2020, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-the-university-of-north-carolina-went-from-a-leader-in-college-reopenings-to-what-the-student-paper-called-a-clusterf-with-135-coronavirus-cases-in-just-7-days/ar-BB18hdkv. Connor Sheets, “‘You Don’t Exist’: Inside UA’s COVID-19 Isolation Dorms,” AL.com, September 4, 2020, https://www.al.com/news/2020/09/you-dont-exist-inside-uas-covid-19-isolation-dorms.html.