On college in the COVID-19 era

I have a day job, you know.  I don't just snark on the internet.  Oddly enough, a significant portion of my day job involves reading other people who snark on the internet, but that's another matter.  Anyway, the 2019-20 academic year just ended, grades submitted and everything is all wrapped up in a nice, tidy bow.  Or, not.  That was weird.  Weirdest academic year ever.

So, how was it?  Is this the wave of the future, or something?

If you are following business news, you may know that many of the people who have spent the last several months working from home actually prefer it, and hope to keep it that way.  Not everyone, of course, but businesses going forward will have to make some decisions about how they structure themselves, and how to adapt.  There are plenty of people who can work from home, who prefer it, and plenty of jobs that really don't need to be done "in the office."  Much rethinking in the business world.

And of course, on-line education isn't really a new thing.  There has been pressure in some quarters to move in something like this direction anyway because technology is, like, the future, or something.

Education... no.  The short version is that the Spring 2020 academic semester was a failure, in my opinion.

Let's talk about learning.  The dirty, little secret of learning is that anyone sufficiently motivated and smart can teach him or herself anything.  Anything.  Some topics are less amenable to self-education.  Math, admittedly, but every mathematical principle that exists was derived.  That means nobody taught it to the person who derived it.  That person taught it to him or herself.  Get some books, some pens and paper, take the time, and you can learn anything.

And really, the goal of education is to get you to the point at which you can teach yourself.  We, professors, do that all the time.  Learning never stops, for an intellectual of any sort.  Professors never stop learning.  We can't.  If we did, we wouldn't be able to perform our jobs anymore.  But, we don't have teachers anymore.  So, we teach ourselves.  And once you are out of school regardless, you don't have professors giving you syllabi, readings, tests, and so forth.  You will still need to learn things, though.  Hopefully, that will include intellectual topics so that you don't become brain-dead morons who sit around watching pro-wrestling.  Read a book.

So... why do you need me?  I can tell you what to read.  That'll save you some time.

But, can't I do that over email, much less Zoom?  Yes.

So, what if you have some difficulty with the concepts?  I can help with that.  The shorter the question, the less back-and-forth we need.  A quick question, and we can resolve it quickly.  An email.  A more involved issue may require a conversation.  But... can't we do that over Zoom?  Do we need to be in the same physical room?

Well...

I guess we can have a Zoom conversation.  I mean, I kind of have a theatrical schtick in the classroom, and as any live performer will tell you, it is difficult to get your performance mindset going without a live audience, but... sure.  We can, like, talk, or something.  There are physical constraints, like the fact that I don't have expansive blackboard space on which to write a large set of mathematical formulae, where you can see the whole of the blackboard, and me, and...  Anyway, there are physical constraints, but in principle, we can have some conversations.  Right?

So, what's the problem?

We can all write idealistic statements about how education should work, intellectualism, autodidacticism, and basic pragmatism, but here's what's missing.

First, autodidacticism is not practical for most people without a high level of base education.  Our educational system is structured to shift more responsibility onto the student sequentially as educational levels increase.  By grad school, it really is mostly self-directed.  Here.  Go away and read this.  That doesn't really work for most students until they reach a high level of base knowledge.  Some can do that, but it gets easier the more you already know.  That's why we don't really start with that until grad school.

Even in grad school though, that approach of "go away and read" works best when you have a cohort.  When I was in grad school, we had a cohort of students who were all studying the same topics.  That meant even though we weren't being lectured at about the materials, we talked to each other, and consequently, taught each other.

That doesn't work when everyone Zooms into a Zoom classroom.

And frankly, even in college, if you attend a real college, you stay up late at night having intellectual discussions in the dorms like pretentious snobs, overestimating your own brilliance.  Those discussions... they won't be as insightful as you think they are, because you're some snot-nosed punk, surrounded by other snot-nosed punks.  But that's a vital part of the learning process!  I loved that part of the learning process, as a snot-nosed punk arguing about pointless, philosophical nonsense as though I knew the first thing about anything!  It was great!  It was also educational, and formative.  Yes, those late-night bullshit sessions are educational.  As a professor, I am telling you, the college students to stay up late, and hang out in the dorm lounges bullshitting with each other because mental sparring is mental exercise.  It's the difference between studying some books on chess, and actually playing chess.  You're never going to get anywhere unless you actually play a game sometime.

No dorms these days.  That's not about me.  I'm not a part of that at all.  I don't come into that picture until the students come 'round asking me about whatever resulted from late night discussions.  That can be done by Zoom, in principle, but the discussions themselves?  Not so much.

And no, internet discussion boards don't work this way.  They don't sharpen your mind.  They deteriorate.

What about the virtual classroom itself?  Even there, it is lacking.  Were transmission-of-facts my only goal, then sure.  I could spout words at my computer's camera and microphone, and then electrons could carry digitized images and sounds all over the world through the inter-tubes, and then those facts could enter the synapses of students anywhere in the world.  Voila!  Edu-ma-cation!

The first problem with this is that it presumes students have the capacity to pay the same level of attention.  They don't.  Plenty of people have been writing lately about the technology gap, so I won't rehash that, but it matters, and we haven't figured out a correction.  Additionally, your home generally has far more distractions than a classroom.  It is just far more difficult for students to be engaged in the "virtual" classroom.

And running a seminar?

Look, here's the best thing in the world, for a professor.  The best thing in the world is when we become invisible.

We pose a question, an idea, a topic, and then a student makes a comment.  Then another student picks up on the first student's comment, and they start arguing with each other as though we-- the professors-- aren't even there.  It's awesome.  It's like that moment as a kid when you put together the pieces of that game, Mousetrap, and everything just works perfectly because as soon as you set everything in motion, it all goes on its own.  Or knocking over a long chain of dominoes.  It's that feeling.

And educationally, it's necessary.  Those are the moments when the students are most engaged, and learning the most because that's when they are thinking most intently.  Not passively waiting to have thoughts stuck into their brains, but thinking intently.

I do not give a rodent's rectum whether or not a student memorizes the formula for a Gaussian distribution.  I care intensely about whether or not they think, and learn to think, because when they can do that, they can teach themselves.  See previous comments.

You know what's kind of difficult on Zoom?  Those deeply-engaged arguments between students.  Part of it is that we, the professors, can't become invisible.  We have to moderate in order to make everything function, technologically.  That's why the best moments I observed during the Zoom era were during student presentations, when the structure required students to engage with each other, if through moderation.  That broke down the Zoom barrier and returned some level of normalcy, but shifting from students interacting with me to students interacting with each other is otherwise rather tricky, based on structural factors, and that matters a lot.

Look, in some ways, I'm old-fashioned.  I have said for years that a college or university needs to provide students with:  faculty, a library, and a physical location in which to meet.  Colleges and universities around the country are coming to rely more on adjuncts and other temporary positions to teach courses because they want to spend their money elsewhere.  Not on libraries, of course.  Censored (And not for the reason you think).  And if universities are skimping on faculty, I guess that means anyone trying to charge ultra-premium prices better have some fancy digs, right?  So... OK.  If you are paying ultra-premium prices, where does that money go?  A few years back, Ben Ginsberg wrote a book called, The Fall of the Faculty:  The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters.  Essentially, if you are paying the jacked-up rates currently being charged for certain absurdly-expensive universities, you are probably getting ripped off to pay for administrators whose job is to justify their own salaries.  According to Ben Ginsberg.  Not me.  I'm not saying this.  Ben Ginsberg said this.  Ben Ginsberg is the one who said that universities are filled with a bunch of useless people best described as "deanlets and deanlings" who make money to do nothing but justify wasting money on them.  Back off, CWRU, I'm just observing what an author wrote in a widely praised book.  "In tenure veritas."

Anyway, since every "elite" university does it, if you want to go to one of these places, well... that's how it works these days, and that's why either your parents are paying an arm and a leg, or why you are taking on so much student debt to take classes from adjuncts in roach-infested buildings.

But remember my basic requirements?  Faculty, library, physical space?

So... no physical space because of COVID-19.  We got shut down at Spring Break this past semester.  What now?  Will colleges open up again in the Fall?

Right now, they want to say so.  Why?  Gimme your money!  Gimme, gimme, gimme.  Would you pay $70,000 per year to Zoom into a classroom?  Seriously?  If so, I should just set up my own university.  I don't remember signing a non-compete clause with CWRU, but I could make out like a bandit here.  Find a bunch of webinar lectures that have been uploaded elsewhere, compile them, put together a battery of on-line tests that have been emailed to me and sent directly to my Spam folder, create my own on-line university, undercut CWRU by half, and I'd still be rolling in bucks!

So right now, universities really want to tell students, hey, we'll be open for business!  Sign those enrollment papers, and more importantly, sign those checks!

Plans?  Not so much.  I'm not going to discuss what I've seen because there's internal stuff going on at CWRU, but here's what is public.  There is a high likelihood of restrictions being lifted in many areas soon.  When that happens, combined with flu season, you'll see another spike in COVID infections.  What then?  If you actually have students living in dorms, which are petrie dishes in the best of times, colleges and universities are going to have to shut down again, and go right back into the Zoom-hole.

Students and families should expect Fall to be like the second half of this past Spring semester.  Classes may start in person, in some form, but I wouldn't plan on them continuing that way.  Any spike in infections, and we wind up with everything getting closed down again because if the dorms remain open during COVID infection spikes, and someone's kid gets sick, their families will sue, and... yeah.  No university wants that.

This is all chaos.  Science fiction has been promising us VR for decades, and it keeps not materializing, or whatever the proper term is for VR.  Not being, you know, material.  If we had full VR classrooms, COVID wouldn't matter as much.  You still wouldn't get those late-night bullshit sessions in the dorms, and those matter, but the classroom could work if we had Matrix classrooms, or pick your reference.  Without that... chaos.

Sorry.  I wish I had more insight, but I'm just a schlub on the internet, shouting at the void.  Alas, that's all classrooms are, until this gets under control, and that's kind of the problem, isn't it?