Late-Late-Late-Stage Pandemic Teaching
Two weeks in and I’m cautiously optimistic about the new school year. Last year was rough. I remember a day in March or April when I was asking my first-years some fairly simple question, and they simply couldn’t or wouldn’t respond. I remember a few days like that, in fact. I finally asked something to the effect of “Are you all OK? Did I say something to offend?” and there followed a very instructive conversation to the effect that They literally hadn’t learned how to keep up with college-level work because they had watched School TV for two years. It was rough to witness, and much rougher for them to experience. As a group, we muddled through — I think that conversation helped — but last year was the first year that I found myself thinking, “I will someday enjoy retirement.” Till then, I had always pictured myself as the kind of guy who will die either in the study or in the classroom.
The learning loss that students experienced over the last couple of years is something that has been seized upon by people who, let us say, oppose treating COVID with the seriousness that I would treat it. In a pinch, I’ll take fewer deaths in exchange for that learning loss. But I’m not sure that we had to make that tradeoff for as long as we did. Decent ventilation in more schools would have helped, for example, and a political system less walled off from reality would have made that fix. Instead, we had the two years that we had, and we lost a lot.