Teaching In The Time Of COVID
Colin sharing his experience with teaching in a COVID world at OSU. This article appeared in the Washington Post.
‘It’s emotionally exhausting’: Grad student workers feel the stress of the pandemic
Danielle Douglas-Gabriel
The Washington Post, September 3, 2020
As classes began at Ohio State University on Aug. 25, Colin Sweeney, a graduate teaching associate, had a lot of unanswered questions.
How often will his classroom be cleaned? Where are the cleaning supplies if he wants to do it himself? What happens if one of the 20 students in his lab section contracts the coronavirus? Will anyone even tell him? And if he gets sick, who will take his place?
“A lot of us still don’t know what the exact policies are,” said Sweeney, a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology. “All of the front-line graduate students are stressed.”
Graduate students have faced disruptions in their research and had their stipends stretched thin during the coronavirus crisis. They are tasked with running courses and guiding undergrads through the uncertainty of this semester, while navigating their own classes, worrying about future funding and a dismal academic job market. With the addition of the ever-present threat of an outbreak, the stress can become unbearable.
“It’s emotionally exhausting,” said Sweeney, 26. “There was a moment last week where I just felt spent. I’m worried about undergrads. I’m worried about grads. I’m worried there is not enough testing.”
All of the courses Sweeney is taking this fall are virtual, a model he had hoped the university would adopt campuswide instead of allowing some classes to meet in person.
The lab section Sweeney is running will be divided into two classrooms, with 10 students in each to maintain social distance. While he teaches in one room, his lesson will be simulcast in another. And from one session to the next, Sweeney will rotate between groups. It’s not ideal, but he said he didn’t have much choice.
Sweeney and other graduate student workers at Ohio State say accommodations for remote teaching were so narrowly prescribed that only people who could qualify are high-risk, live with someone at risk or are without child care. And those restrictions left many teaching and research assistants with no other option than to be in the classroom to meet the conditions of their contracts.
Graduate students at other schools, including Marquette and Boston universities and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, have lodged similar complaints about feeling pressured or being required to teach in person.
Ohio State spokesman Benjamin Johnson said the university is working to accommodate its most vulnerable employees and has approved 54 remote teaching requests from graduate assistants to date, with another 30 requests being processed.
The university cleans and disinfects door handles, faucets, handrails and other surfaces in high-traffic areas at least twice a day, and does the same with classrooms every night, Johnson said. Ohio State has assembled more than 85,000 safety kits for students, faculty and staff members, complete with masks, a thermometer, disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer.
Days before the semester began, the university suspended 228 students for violating its safety protocols, signaling that enforcement will be taken seriously. But Sweeney argues that policing students on campus will not be enough to protect against a virus that they could contract at any restaurant, bar or grocery store in the surrounding community.Two of his students are now in isolation.
At Texas Tech University, Nazmus Sakib, 31, said he was apprehensive about teaching in person, but was relieved to see undergraduates wearing masks and otherwise taking the health risks seriously when classes resumed two weeks ago at the campus in Lubbock, Tex.
Sakib, a doctoral candidate in political science, had the option of teaching online but thought face-to-face instruction would offer some security. A Bangladeshi national, Sakib worries that the Trump administration could revisit its controversial plan to require international students to leave the United States unless they are enrolled in at least one in-person class. If some new iteration of the plan emerges, Sakib said, he hopes his role as an instructor will save him.
There are no more classes for him to take, just a dissertation to write and a job to find. The latter is especially daunting. With one college after another imposing hiring freezes to stem budget shortfalls created by the pandemic, Sakib’s prospects for an academic job are slim.
“It’s horrible,” Sakib said of the academic job market. “I’m looking for openings every day and it’s unusually low. There are a few jobs outside of academia at think tanks, but those are harder for international students due to the immigration process. I’m looking for anything.”
Despite the stress and uncertainty of what lies ahead for him, Sakib is committed to helping the 23 students in his class get through an unusual semester with some semblance of normalcy.
Zachory Park, a doctoral candidate in biology at Georgetown University, worries about whether the undergraduate he is working with this fall will get the most out of the experience. Scientific research often requires hands-on demonstration in proximity, none of which is safe in this environment.
“I suppose you can angle just right to help somebody see what’s going on from a safe distance. It’s certainly a new frontier,” Park said.
All the same, Park, 25, is eager to make the best of the situation. It will be a challenge, but not the only one he has faced this year. Park was forced to put his thesis research on hold for four months when the university shuttered in the spring. He has been back in the lab with a handful of people since July but is weary of more people returning to campus.
Although Georgetown has begun the school year online, biomedical, life and physical sciences research is taking place on campus. Park said he fears an outbreak could result in another shutdown that would undermine his ability to catch up and complete his work.
He is also concerned about the gaps in health-care coverage for some graduate student workers at the university. The Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees secured six weeks of paid sick leave for doctoral students in its first union contract this spring, but the benefit does not extend to hourly workers pursuing a master’s degree. The alliance, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers union, has urged the university to make a concession, to no avail.
“We’re not asking for hazard pay or anything like that. We’re really just asking for clarity, stability and accountability during a global pandemic,” Park said.
Georgetown said the university has worked with the graduate student union in recent weeks to update policies supporting international students and teaching assistants in the wake of the pandemic.
“Our changes to these policies reflect a good-faith effort to address the issues that GAGE-AFT members have expressed in sessions over the last few weeks,” said Meghan Dubyak, a spokeswoman for Georgetown.
Graduate labor activists have fought for expanded health care, appointment extensions and safety protections during the pandemic. Those at Brown University won an emergency fund for coronavirus relief in their recent union contract, while graduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago secured mental health counseling and more paid sick leave.
Still, graduate student workers say they feel largely ignored by their universities and want greater input in decisions that can affect their education, livelihoods and health.
“People feel scared. Graduate students don’t feel listened to,” said Sweeney at Ohio State. “I don’t think people recognize that this is a once-in-a-lifetime crisis and they didn’t treat it with the appropriate seriousness.”