cab67
cab67's Journalanother reason to be hacked off at denialists: the COVID generation.
Ever since this whole thing began, I've been upset that my daughter (who turns six this month) hasn't really had the kind of childhood she deserves. She hasn't been able to run and play with her friends like we used to. I thought George Carlin was right to denounce the whole concept of "play dates," and although I still think they're absurd under normal circumstances, these aren't normal circumstances. We have to choreograph online "birthday parties" and find ways to keep rambunctious toddlers and kindergartners occupied while simultaneously not living in a ruined house full of destroyed furniture.
But the real magnitude of this is really dawning on me now that the first generation of COVID-era high school graduates has finished a semester of college.
This is something we all discussed last spring and summer. Incoming fall 2021 freshmen might not be as prepared as previous classes. They'd mostly have been taking classes virtually. Some would have had fully-engaged parents who really stepped up to fortify their education, but many would not. Their educations would essentially be incomplete, and they might have lost the skills needed to function in a classroom environment.
I was already on-guard for this based on my experience during the fall 2020 semester. My large-enrollment class was online for the first time. (I hated it.) Ordinarily, for a class that size (between 150 and 200), I'd get two or three students reaching out for help because of mental health issues. But in the fall of 2020, it was more like nine or ten. I was compelled to circulate an email to the whole class explaining that we all understood it was hard - on top of the pandemic, there was the upcoming election and ongoing protests against racism and police violence. It really looked like the world was coming apart at its plate boundaries. I expressed a real willingness to help and pointed them to some on-campus resources. No idea if it did any good, but I couldn't ignore what appeared to be a general sense of despair.
So fast-forward to this past fall semester. All of our worries came true. My lectures were still online (which I still hate), but the labs were in-person, as were some of my office hours. The new students were, by and large, not really prepared. I actually rolled back on some of the details I expected students to learn, but even though the exams were easier than in previous years, averages were substantially (and, in a statistical sense, significantly) lower.
Many of them literally didn't know how to take notes or study for an exam. And boy howdy was I tarred with their anger in my evaluations - my tests were too hard, I didn't provide my notes online, I didn't provide a study guide (in college!), and I was an overall arrogant prick who expected too much.
That the lectures were online may explain a lot of this, but not all. My TA's, who taught the students in person, reported similar challenges - the students didn't really understand that they could ask questions if they weren't sure about something, for example, or that they could discuss things in groups.
I also suspect the ongoing emphasis on standardized tests continues to play a role. When I started teaching as a teaching assistant in the 1990's, I would get a lot of questions about how to study for a test. That continued to be true when I started my faculty position in 2001. But over time, I've gotten more and more questions about how to take the test. That's a very different question. And "know the material well enough to answer the questions" doesn't ever seem to be a satisfactory answer. This was also a point made by many evals - that I didn't prepare them enough for the tests, in spite of telling them exactly what format to expect, asking them questions on lab assignments that were very similar to what they'd see on the exam, giving them handouts with the exam with much of the information so they wouldn't have to memorize it, and repeating all of this exhaustively in the weeks before a midterm.
I'm not really that upset with the evals. The students had every right to be outraged. And of course they directed it at me - who else were they going to complain to? They may not have realized how unprepared they were, and when faced with something that went beyond their expected level of work, they were pissed. Knowing how I understood things when I was a freshman, I'd probably have acted the same way.
I don't think the students were lazy. Many approached me after a mediocre first exam performance with a real desire to do better, and some of them did improve their scores on the second exam. They were doing the best they could with what they brought to campus.
I don't blame the students. I don't even necessarily blame their parents or their high schools, either. The pandemic forced them out of physical classrooms for their senior years.
I do, however, put some of the blame on those who didn't take this thing seriously from the beginning. The vaccine wouldn't have made much of a difference - it really only became widespread through the spring, while high school seniors were still mostly online. But people protested the simple decency of wearing a mask in public, crying out that it was an inexcusable trespass on their rights. (Never mind that their insistence on defending their rights infringed on the rights of those who are immune-compromised.) Had they really accepted their civic duty, it's possible we could have been able to safely teach in-person after the winter holidays. This would have made a big difference.
Instead, we had schools and colleges opening for in-person instruction during the fall of 2020, only to go online again when cases among students spiked. We had parents confronting school administrators about their tyranny and blind acceptance of physical reality. We had governors who decided it was better to let people infect their communities than to protect their citizens. What could have been a much less severe situation by January 2021 was worse than when it started.
And you know what? It's not getting better. Had everyone who can get vaccinated gotten the vaccine, we might not be facing the new variants that require booster shots. There wouldn't have been nearly as many breakout cases for the simple reason that fewer people would be infected. Not sure if the whole thing would be over, but things would not be nearly so bad.
I might not be scared shitless because my class this spring is in-persn and I have a daughter who's about to turn six.
Richard Leakey
As many of you have now seen, Kenyan paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey has passed away.
There are lots of articles out there detailing his incredible life, but I have a few thoughts as someone who works with the collections he helped build and who has collaborated with the Leakey family - especially his wife, Meave, who is herself a central figure in East African paleontology and paleoanthropology.
The early humans he and his field crews collected are treated like national treasures in Nairobi - as they should be. But his groups collected more than just primates; they collected pretty much everything. Sure, they were happy to find something that would make the front pages of the newspapers of the world (which they did more than once), but their interest was much broader than that - they wanted to reconstruct the entire tapestry of human origins in the Cradle of Humanity. That meant collecting every bit of evidence they could - volcanic ash and lava for radiometric dating, sedimentary samples for geochemical paleoecology and paleomagnetic dating, and fossils of every type of organism they came across. This allowed people with unhealthy fixations on other animals - crocodiles, in my case - to contribute to the picture.
(I'm actually not that interested in human origjns per se. Mostly, I'm interested in the crocodiles, which were the largest predators our ancestors faced. My animals ate everyone else's animals.)
Paleoanthropology is as close as the scientific endeavor comes to an actual blood sport. Paleoanthropologists can be highly territorial and possessive of whatever they're working on, and given the publicity and interest drawn to the field, it can attract some highly competitive and driven people with egos large enough to exert their own perceptible gravitational pull. They sometimes just plain don't like each other. In fact, I was reluctant to start working on the East African crocodile fossil record precisely because of this.
Meave and Richard proved me wrong, at least when it came to people who view primates as someone else's scientific problem - they were both incredibly kind and generous to me and, far more importantly, my students. I won't forget it.
If you're ever in Nairobi, the National Museums of Kenya is a must-see. It's set in a green setting that can be fantastic for birds, especially before the crowds come. The exhibits are first-rate. And a lot of that reflects Richard Leakey's amazing level of energy and dedication.
Profile Information
Member since: Wed Jul 24, 2013, 01:10 PMNumber of posts: 2,992
