Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Once Again: To Zoom or Not to Zoom

Much as I love my job, teaching at Penn State sometimes feels like driving with a co-pilot who has no sense of direction. When administration tells faculty to turn right, I’m thinking, hmm, we should probably hang a left. 

Mostly I’m thinking of the way Old Main has managed the COVID situation. After a year of remote instruction, the administration ordered everyone back into the classroom for the Fall 2021 semester without requiring that everyone be vaccinated. 

Before the start of the Spring 2022 semester, now in its second week, the administration sent us back into the classroom again rather than have us wait out the peak weeks of the Omicron variant on Zoom. 

True, the university’s handling of the fall semester worked out. We did not have the big outbreak that many of us feared.  

The numbers don’t necessarily affirm the wisdom of Old Main’s policies, however. 

As I tell students in my journalism ethics class, a good outcome doesn’t automatically mean that you made the right decision. Sometimes you get lucky. (Getting home in one piece after driving drunk doesn’t make driving drunk the correct course of action.)

I still think it was shameful for a major research institution to ignore the scientific consensus and provide intellectual cover to the anti-vaxxers in our midst, especially the ones who vote on our budget in the state legislature.  

Now along comes Omicron, less dangerous overall than Delta and “Classic” COVID-19, but more contagious. More cases mean more hospitalizations and more deaths, even if percentage-wise, the number of people getting seriously ill and dying is dropping. 

At Penn State, the highest weekly total of positive COVID tests during the fall was 196, with a positivity rate of 2%. From Jan. 3-9, the number of cases shot up to 430, with a positivity rate of 10.5%. 

Given the numbers, I counted myself among faculty who thought the wisest course was to start the semester on Zoom and see how things go. Then, in a few weeks, assuming Omicron’s peak will have passed, we could pivot to the classroom.

In the first of his weekly messages to the faculty this semester, Penn State Vice President Nick Jones acknowledged that while the university’s classrooms are officially open for business, we’re allowed to teach remotely – up to a point. That point is just under a quarter of a class’s total meeting time, or about three-and-a-half weeks.

I spent the weekend before my first classes fretting about what to do. I consulted with my colleagues and with the students in my classes. No consensus emerged. 

In one camp were those who believe “we’re all going to get it” sooner or later, so we may as well go about our business. That must be the thinking of all the unmasked folk I saw in a local supermarket the other day. 

In the other camp were those who think we should keep trying like mad not to get it – or spread it. 

The belief that “we’re all going to get it” has the makings of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we all gather unmasked indoors, odds are we all will get it – or many of us, anyway. What’s important is that we not all get it at the same time so we don’t overwhelm our one local hospital. (At January’s midpoint, Mount Nittany Medical Center had more COVID patients than it had in any previous month of the pandemic.)

Writing in the Centre Daily Times last week, a Penn State colleague accused faculty Zoomers of being “panic-driven.” He also chided us for wanting to work from home when store clerks and other essential workers don’t have that option.

I didn’t hear any panic during a Zoom meeting organized by the Coalition for a Just University – just a group of people wanting to do the responsible thing. Many jobs cannot be done remotely, obviously. But those who can work from home, should. We who teach at universities can. 

I don’t doubt for a second that online classes are an inferior way to teach and learn. If we planned to go remote for the entire semester, I might agree with the Brown University professor who wrote in the Atlantic that students can’t take any more social isolation. 

But we’re only talking about staying off campus during these peak weeks. My sense is that most students can handle starting the semester on Zoom if they know they’ll be coming to class in early February.  

Indeed, despite the likelihood of mild cases and their reluctance to return to surfing from one online class to the next without ever leaving their apartment, the majority of students who responded to my request for input agreed that it would be safer to start the semester on Zoom.

And so we have. Back to black boxes and bare feet. For the last time, I hope. May Old Main’s COVID management luck hold.