TITLE: Feeling Unstuck Amid the Pandemic
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 01, 2020 3:19 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Rands recently wrote about
his work-from-home routine.
I love the idea of walking around a large wooded yard while doing
audio meetings... One of his reasons for feeling so at ease struck
a chord with me:
Everyone desperately wants to return to normality. I am a
professional optimist, but we are not returning to normal.
Ever. This is a different forever situation, and the sooner
we realize that and start to plan accordingly, the sooner we
will feel unstuck.
I have written or spoken a variation of this advice so many times
over my fifteen years as department head, most often in the context
of state funding and our university budget.
Almost every year for my first decade as head, we faced a flat or
reduced budget, and every time several university colleagues
expressed a desire to ride the storm out: make temporary changes
to how we operate and wait for our budgets to return to normal.
This was usually accompanied by a wistful desire that we could
somehow persuade legislators of our deep, abiding value and thus
convince them to allocate more dollars to the university or,
failing that, that new legislators some future legislature would
have different priorities.
Needless to say, the good old days never returned, and our budget
remained on a downward slide that began in the late 1990s. This
particular form of optimism was really avoidance of reality, and
it led to many people living in a state of disappointment and
discomfort for years. Fortunately, over the last five or ten
years, most everyone has come to realize that what we have now is
normal and has begun to plan accordingly. It is psychologically
powerful to accept reality and begin acting with agency.
As for the changes brought on by the pandemic, I must admit that I
am undecided about how much of what has changed over the last few
months will be the normal way of the university going forward.
My department colleagues and I have been discussing how the need
for separation among students in the classroom affects how we
teach. Our campus doesn't have enough big rooms for everyone to
move each class into a room with twice the capacity, so most of us
are looking at ways to teach hybrid classes, with only half of our
students in the classroom with us on any given day. This makes
most of us sad and even a little depressed: how can we teach our
courses as well as we always have in the past when new constraints
don't allow us to do what we have optimized our teaching to do?
I have started thinking of the coming year in terms of
hill climbing,
an old idea from AI. After years of hard work and practice, most
of us are at a local maximum in our teaching. The pandemic has
disoriented us by dropping us at a random point in the environment.
The downside of change in position is that we are no longer at our
locally-optimal point for teaching our courses. The upside is that
we get to search again under new conditions. Perhaps we can find
a new local maximum, perhaps even one higher than our old max. If
not, at least we have conducted a valuable experiment under trying
conditions and can use what we learn going forward.
This analogy helps me approach
my new course
with more positive energy. A couple of my colleagues tell me it
has helped them, too.
As many others have noted, the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated a few
changes that were already taking place in our universities, in
particular in the use of digital technology to engage students and
to replace older processes. Of the other changes we've seen, some
will certainly stick, but I'm not sure anyone really knows which
ones. Part of the key to living with the uncertainty is not to tie
ourselves too closely to what we did before.
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