Excited. Unsettled. Anxious. Relieved. Overwhelmed. Optimistic. Fatigued.
Those were some of the responses my colleague Renea Nichols got when she asked her public relations students to describe in one word how they were feeling on the first day of Penn State’s fall semester.
Emotions, clearly, were mixed. Just about everyone was eager to return to the classroom after a year and a half of remote instruction. But knowing they might be among unvaccinated classmates and risk breakthrough infections dampened enthusiasm.
Nichols had a strict protocol for entering her room. A free-standing hand sanitizer dispenser stood in the doorway. She ordered each arrival to goop up, grab a wipe and run it over their keyboard and mouse.
**
Paul Kellermann took a different tack. His round-the-room icebreaker called for each student in his first-year rhetoric and composition class to name their biggest fear.
Two or three said birds, heights, drowning or snakes.
Birds?
Other phobias were small spaces, clowns, rejection, dying young, not succeeding, getting stuck in the rat race and disappointing one’s family.
Only one mentioned COVID and climate change.
Then one of Kellermann’s crew asked him to name his biggest fear.
His clever answer: “Being asked personal questions by students.”
**
I like seeing how my peers teach. I especially like coming to class on the first day to observe the opening ceremonies of a new semester. And with all the uncertainty and dissent around COVID, I thought this would be a particularly interesting year to slip in – by invitation — and be a fly on the wall.
Lisa Sternlieb teaches a class called “What Is Literature?” On Day One she had her students tackle that very question. Among the secondary questions that emerged:
- Does a work have to be a classic – i.e., one that people have been reading for a very long time – to be literature?
- Does literature have to be instructive?
- Do the characters have to be “relatable?”
- Is an instruction manual literature?
Renea Nichols asked her public relations class, “What exactly is public relations?” She drew a picture of Old Main on the board (I thought it was a dustpan) and used Penn State as an example of an organization that communicates with many “publics” in many ways.
Next, I thought she’d invite a critique of the way the Dustpan has communicated its COVID policies (abysmally, in my view), but she didn’t go there.
My colleague Maura Shea launched her film and video editing class with a slide presentation that outlined what editors do, ending, delightfully, with what she referred to as “The Huggies Chase Scene” from the movie “Raising Arizona” (featuring the classic line, “Son, you got a panty on your head.” You can watch most of the scene here.)
Then there were my classes. I had a hard time deciding whether to teach my first classes remotely as part of the Zoom-In protest against Penn State’s we-really-want-you-to-but-we‘re-not-gonna-make-you COVID vaccination policy. I’m all for the vaccine mandate, but I was reluctant to tell Zoom-weary students, “hey, guess what, we’re gonna start the new semester the same way we ended the old one.”
Then I thought, why not ask them, room, or Zoom? I was hugely impressed by the thoughtfulness of their responses. Here too, emotions were mixed.
One student, a supporter of mandatory vaccinations, wrote that she was disappointed in Penn State’s decisions. “While I am really excited to get back on campus this fall and learn inside an actual classroom,…I can wait another day to get back in the classroom.”
Another pro-Zoom-In class member called Penn State’s plans “disorganized and unclear, so perhaps this (hopefully) widespread effort will wake up the administration.”
And a student who wanted to meet in-person said holding class online for the few who haven’t been vaccinated “seems to hand those of us who have been responsible the short end of the stick.”
In the end, I decided I wanted to meet my students in the flesh, and not because Old Main threatened “disciplinary action” against those who participated in the Zoom-In. (Disciplinary action! Way to further alienate the faculty, Old Main!)
**
I don’t know what the students are doing when they’re off campus, but I can report almost total compliance with the mask mandate in the four classes I visited, the four that I taught and the corridors I walked through en route to each.
The two exceptions:
A colleague told a student walking past my office to “mask up, please.” He apologized and immediately did so.
A student in one of my classes walked in with a napkin over his nose and mouth, came right to the podium and asked, apologetically, for a mask. I had a package of them.
And then, as I knew they would, my glasses fogged up, my sweat glands went into high gear and masked, I began my 24th year (!) of teaching at Penn State.
