It’s a relatively quiet week for me and my students. They turned in their papers last Wednesday (by and large), and now Roshani and I are grading papers and missing assignments. Grades are due next Tuesday,
The rapid spread of the Omicron variant of the COVID virus is troubling. The university has announced that it has already been detected on campus. Cornell and Princeton have both shut down their physical facilities and moved to online finals. A number of faculty are concerned that there is no mandate in place for all of us, including students, to get the booster since we know that patients who are boosted are not immune, but that they do have milder symptoms than those who are not. (Both MIT and Brown have announced booster mandates.) Fortunately, this is a time where students are leaving the campus and social distancing is rather naturally taking place.
This administration has a lot to take into account, including the fact that it is a state institution, subject to the governor’s guidelines. I can really only speak for myself (boosted and vaccinated) when I say that I am now working on my course website for the quarter that begins January 3, and I am planning it to be either in person or online, whichever turns out to be the case. I am at this point reasonably certain that we will be online, since effects of the holiday spread of omicron will start showing up in early January.
I try hard not to be angry at the folks who refuse to be vaccinated, and the effect they are having on our medical centers and our ICUs, where teams have been working at a frantic pace for nearly two years now. A teacher’s life is different than a first responder, but no less anxious as we continue to make accommodations for students who are sick, who are the only English language speaker in their family and therefore called upon to perform unrelenting service in medical matters, on students working more than one job and going to school at the same time. “It seems like we are always thinking about COVID,” one of my students said. I could only agree.