Friday, January 14, 2022

Five Minute Blogging: This Is Tiring

I am teaching an intro class for the first time at my current institution and it is exhausting.  The level of people-related involvement!  The coaxing answers out of my class!  The constant monitoring of whether the class understands!  Whew, it's a lot easier to teach upper-class science majors.  They will straight up ask me to go back and redo a whole concept if they don't get it.  Today someone was too polite and it took another student asking for me to realize what he meant was "Hey, you forgot a 2 there, right?"  ("Where do the 2 Na+ come from?" is not specific enough.)

My middle child developed a sudden fever two nights ago and we got to do the 'help I must now drive around searching for rapid tests' shuffle after dinner.  This is not helping with the exhaustion. (It's not covid, it's a cold or something.) 

So far we're only ('only') up to 5% of everyone on campus testing positive for covid.  In the past four days.  Yes. At least... it'll be over fast? 


4 comments:

  1. Teaching the 101 class every semester and students failing is a big reason that DH left academia.

    I am so grateful that my friend told me to stock up on antigen tests the second they came into stock at cvs.com a month ago. And that we've only had to use one so far. I don't even know where we could go in town to get a test for anyone who isn't me. (The uni will let me get tested on campus, but not my family.) All the pop-up sites that weren't reporting their information to the health department got shut down "for unknown reasons" according to local news.

    Surprisingly, DC2 hasn't gotten sick yet. When she last was at school pre-pandemic, she still had a permanent nose drip which went away two weeks after quarantine and never came back. She says they're really good about sanitizing hands and keyboards before and after computer use now, which they never were in the past. So that may not be protecting against covid, but it does seem to be protecting against general crud that's spread through surface transmission.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wanted to buy a bunch of rapid tests like 6 weeks ago and my spouse was dead set against it ('why would we need that') and anyhow, I enjoyed my tour of the pharmacies of [small town] in the dark.

      Delete
    2. We brought them with us on vacation in case we needed to test the cousins who were staying with us. (But by the time they started sniffling we'd already spent a ton of time with them and DC2 and I got the mild cold anyway, which is why we used one test. So I guess DC2 *has* gotten sick, just not from school.)

      I'm sorry about the tour of the pharmacies. We've heard anecdotally that Walmart in our town tends to have them when everywhere else doesn't, but I'm not sure if that's actually true or if it just sounds true.

      Delete
    3. Not our walmart! But they sent me to cvs, which had about 300. Related: they should cost $1 and be everywhere, this is some bullshit.

      Delete

Comments are moderated, so it may take a day or two to show up. Anonymous comments will be deleted.