Teaching in-person

The Wisconsin State Journal ran this article (for which I was interviewed) about return to school. (For reasons I don’t understand, the article is not accessible in many countries: sorry). A colleague in the Economics department emailed me after seeing the article saying that, quite apart from admiring the picture of the back of my head, he envied me the in-person experience, and wished that the campus had a physically distance-able space for his 420-person class. The email brought into focus the thought that I’m kind of a free-rider here. If everything were in-person I don’t think I – or anybody – would be feeling safe, or enjoying it very much. But, given how we are actually doing it (with most teaching online), I feel very good about teaching in-person, and will regret it if we aren’t able to continue through to Thanksgiving (which is the plan). I have those of my colleagues who are not teaching in-person to thank.

How are we doing actually doing it? Well, it’s true, as the article says, that 43% of classes have some in-person component. Every single in-person element is small, socially distanced, and masked. And the 43% figure might really mislead you. For many classes ‘component’ is a key term. I’m thinking of a 240-person 4-credit class in which everything is online, except for 3 discussion sections. That class is included in the 43%: but out of 960-person-credit hours, only 60 are actually in-person. I don’t know the exact proportion of credit hours that are in-person, but judging by conversations I’ve had with students, and comparing the trickles of students on campus with the usual crowds I would be really, really, surprised if it is as much as 15%.

And I really do mean trickle. One of my classes is T/Th 11am in the Business School building (one of the few buildings new enough that all the rooms really were designed for learning). Usually during that slot the building is heaving with students – like Christmas shopping on Oxford Street but without the packages. Normally all the classrooms are fully occupied. Last Thursday, at what would usually be its busiest time of the week, the building was almost empty, with most classrooms free. It was no challenge at all to keep a 6 feet gap between yourself and the next person. It wouldn’t have been a challenge to maintain a 60 feet gap, if that were your preference.

If anyone is sick the instructions are clear: they should not come to class. Maybe some students will not comply with this rule; but it won’t be many. We’ve made it clear that we will accommodate absences: in my classes if you are sick but functional you will be zoomed in, and participate in the class just like everyone else (and, indeed, one of my classes is hybrid by design). On the first day one student had been tested, but her negative result hadn’t yet come through, so we zoomed her in, and her experience was less good than it would have been in person, but better, I am convinced, than if we were all online. Indeed, she’s the only student whose face I’ve seen so far!

One of the comments in the State Journal seemed to me to make an error I’ve seen elsewhere, conflating in-person teaching with everything else students living on or near the campus are doing. Our Chancellor is quoted as saying, rightly, that we knew that students were going to be back in Madison regardless of what we did. Nobody has proposed that we go out of business, but even if we’d done that most of them would have come to Madison. For sure, having young people come in from out of town, and then hang around with each other in town, was bound to increase the number of cases. The question for us was how to weigh the educational benefits of having some in-person teaching against the health risks of having that in-person teaching.

When requesting that my teaching be in-person I gambled that, for me, even in a physically-distanced, fully masked, environment, I would be able to make significantly more learning happen than online. The work I’ve been doing with our instructional continuity team since July has convinced me that I was right about that, and I remain convinced. It’s really remarkably normal.

The other gamble, I suppose, was that it is reasonably safe.

Remember that all the classes that are meeting in person are small – small enough to be physically distanced. As you can see from the picture of the back of my head, the larger of these small classes are meeting in vast rooms, and even the smaller ones are meeting in pretty large rooms. The evidence so far is that the administration is going to be quite vigorous in enforcing the public health norms that they have outlined. Students with symptoms will be too embarrassed to come to class, even if they want to; even the tiny minority of students who are incautious enough not to care about spreading the disease in class know that a substantial number of their peers will not appreciate being put at risk and will let them know in no uncertain terms. I haven’t heard a cough or a sneeze yet, but I anticipate anyone who does feeling very awkward. [1]

Offering some amount of in-person instruction has created some inducements to behave more safely outside of class. One advantage of having some in-person instruction is that many students really seem to value that and have a reason to avoid becoming infected (not just by COVID, but by anything). Another advantage that hadn’t occurred to me until talking to the students is that the in-person-class-valuing students are exerting pressure on their non-in-person-class-valuing roommates not to behave in ways that might bring infection into their abodes. I realise that we might, at some point, need to close down in-person instruction, but the moment we do that the following will happen: i) these particular inducements to avoid infection will be removed, and ii) there will be no more 50- and 75- minute periods during the week in which students are rigorously physically distanced and wearing masks. As things stand, if we move everything online, there’s a good chance that will make things more dangerous.

[1] I have been having the most awful seasonal allergies, and feared that it might cause awkwardness before remembering that one of the many things I love about being in classrooms and my office is that my allergies evaporate as soon as I enter a university building. Also, the only coughing I have done in the past 6 months has been caused by the masks my mother-in-law made, but fortunately I now have non-cough-inducing masks from UW Madison and Worcestershire County Cricket Club. Indeed, it now occurs to me that the only coughing I have heard in all that time has been my own, caused by masks, and my son’s, caused by his remarkable ability to cough at will and enthusiasm for annoying everyone around him.