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School Talk

@Strick because the reply feature is busted

We use Microsoft Teams, or at least other teachers do. I just post assignments and include links to related content videos (Crash Course, Khan Academy, APUSH Review) that are much better produced than anything I could make.

I didn't really lecture at school, so I'm not going to start doing it now.
 
I'm sure that administrators will try to shit on workers, but the on-the-ground experience of educators seems to suggest that remote teaching is a disaster without a lot of remote pedagogy training and students who were interested in remote learning in the first place.

Summer enrollments at my institution have plummeted in large part because students aren't interested in paying for credits that are basically youtube videos with chat rooms attached. It's almost impossible to facilitate a larger discussion-based class when the platforms can't even fit all of the screens on an instructors full screen.

Brasky, what platform are y'all using? Zoom is a mess from my experience, though definitely the best interface like this that I've used before.

Yep. I think this will pretty much end the push to move more courses and programs online. Students and instructors don’t want to be forced to do it. I also hope that quality online instruction will be considered more valuable so the instructors who are good at online will get paid more to do it.

teaching public speaking online is gonna be real fun this summer.

Not as fun as my wife’s focus group methods course.
 
Are law profs still requiring students to stand while reciting on a case? That has to be very weird to have to do that in the comfort of your bedroom, dining room, etc.
 
I met with one of my grad students today and he told me about an interesting plan going around for keeping continuity while closing campus.

Treat Fall 2020 like a summer semester. Offer core courses and general education courses and general education courses. Don't offer electives or required courses. No grad courses, but grad assistants can teach and take research hours. Shift Fall to Spring. Offer prereqs that are typically offered in the Fall over the Spring semester. Any courses currently scheduled for Fall 2020 can be moved to Spring. Then shift Spring to Summer 2021.

This should help keep continuity for majors. Students wouldn't be expected to return to campus until January but they could come back in September if they want. 9-month faculty who are usually just paid August to May could opt to stretch out their checks for 12 months starting in August.

It could apply to sports as well. Start football season in January. Account for weather by adjusting the schedule to make sure cold weather schools aren't hosting during the worst weather. Add some neutral games to the Big Ten schedule. I'm sure US Bank Stadium, Lucas Oil Stadium, and Ford Field would be happy to host games. Postseason could start in April. Other sports could be shuffled around as necessary.

There is plenty of figure out and it would work best if most colleges and universities got on the same page. It's a promising idea.
 
I'm hearing that the delayed start plan has already been approved at several smaller SLACs in the NE. These are primarily residential and without major athletics programs
 
If schools don’t figure out a way to have students on campus this fall, there will be a lot pursuing gap years. That would be disastrous financially for said schools coupled with other lost income sources.
 
If schools don’t figure out a way to have students on campus this fall, there will be a lot pursuing gap years. That would be disastrous financially for said schools coupled with other lost income sources.

Plus this is THE year for the bulldogs.
 
This guy is a pretty good twitter follow. He teaches ornithology and evolution at a NY state school. He’s been posting short video clips of his online teaching lectures and the ornithology lab has been especially tough...it was supposed to be field trips to different type of habitats to find and listen for birds. Any way he tweeted this and I laughed:

 
This is dark. He's a prof at Tulsa.

 
First example of seen of this. Probably won't be the last.
https://sociology.princeton.edu/graduate-program [h=2]A NOTICE TO PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS[/h] We regret to announce that Princeton Sociology will not accept applications during the 2021 admissions cycle. In order to ensure that the department has resources to adequately support its students during the covid-19 pandemic, we will hold off on bringing new students to the program until 2022. The decision to eliminate a cohort of future students was not an easy one, but we have decided that our priority during these unsettled times is to take care of those who are already matriculated in the department. We look forward to reading applications again in the fall of 2021 for the 2022 cohort.
 
First example of seen of this. Probably won't be the last.
https://sociology.princeton.edu/graduate-program [h=2]A NOTICE TO PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS[/h] We regret to announce that Princeton Sociology will not accept applications during the 2021 admissions cycle. In order to ensure that the department has resources to adequately support its students during the covid-19 pandemic, we will hold off on bringing new students to the program until 2022. The decision to eliminate a cohort of future students was not an easy one, but we have decided that our priority during these unsettled times is to take care of those who are already matriculated in the department. We look forward to reading applications again in the fall of 2021 for the 2022 cohort.

I have been seeing this posted a lot. What’s your read on this situation from the faculty perspective?
 
It doesn’t seem like it comes from outside of the program. They know their own resources. Some departments go into a cycle knowing they can only take a smaller cohort. Maybe they’ve had a few large cohorts. Maybe they have more students than usual in their 5th or 6th years.

Seems like they were probably in that situation anyway. This crisis has made it harder for some PhD candidates to collect data. Some may have had to change their topics all together.

In light of that, it’s responsible to make sure they have the resources to support the 2020 cohort. And they won’t waste the time of potential 2021 applicants or their own faculty.

Princeton is at the top of chain. They do Fall applications. They probably don’t have a ton of classes taught by grad students. They won’t take a hit to their reputation. This won’t impact future applications.

From the outside, this is a smart move and I expect other programs to weigh the risks and do the same. It definitely sucks overall though. It’s an early trickle down of the hiring freezes and such.

We have two tenure track lines on hold from last year. Really hope we can get both of them based on the logic that we first asked for them two years ago, we’ve had three faculty retire and one scooped up by administration, and it’s a chance to be aggressive while other programs aren’t hiring.
 
Strick, how much do you think this has changed your research?

My current project is adding a third round of longitudinal interviews to get a before, during, and (hopefully) after the COVID-19 crisis. It’s on employment pathways so we have to take this crisis into account.
 
Strick, how much do you think this has changed your research?

My current project is adding a third round of longitudinal interviews to get a before, during, and (hopefully) after the COVID-19 crisis. It’s on employment pathways so we have to take this crisis into account.

Thanks for asking. I mean, fortunately, the majority of my fieldwork is finished and I actually have started working on the paper that finally makes use of the last round of data analysis. I kind of want to see how this whole situation changes the dynamic, particularly with a predicted record number of cases expected to be filed when the courts reopen. I can probably do most of my remaining interviews remotely, though, so I'm pretty fortunate in scheme of things. That'll be the end of the dissertation, hopefully, so we'll see.

I think the real trouble for grad students in the social sciences is going to be the job market in two years. Weirdly, I think this year is going to be the best of the three similarly to how 2008 was a bad job market year, but 2009 and 2010 were just brutal because of the backlogged job applicants. I'm hoping that my advisers can step up in a big way to help me navigate this, though, so we'll see (social capital and whatnot).
 
It doesn’t seem like it comes from outside of the program. They know their own resources. Some departments go into a cycle knowing they can only take a smaller cohort. Maybe they’ve had a few large cohorts. Maybe they have more students than usual in their 5th or 6th years.

Seems like they were probably in that situation anyway. This crisis has made it harder for some PhD candidates to collect data. Some may have had to change their topics all together.

In light of that, it’s responsible to make sure they have the resources to support the 2020 cohort. And they won’t waste the time of potential 2021 applicants or their own faculty.

Princeton is at the top of chain. They do Fall applications. They probably don’t have a ton of classes taught by grad students. They won’t take a hit to their reputation. This won’t impact future applications.

From the outside, this is a smart move and I expect other programs to weigh the risks and do the same. It definitely sucks overall though. It’s an early trickle down of the hiring freezes and such.

We have two tenure track lines on hold from last year. Really hope we can get both of them based on the logic that we first asked for them two years ago, we’ve had three faculty retire and one scooped up by administration, and it’s a chance to be aggressive while other programs aren’t hiring.

Interesting takes. I hope y'all get your hires because, if anything, you'll be back up and running before a lot of peer institutions and I'm guessing Sociology is probably a pretty well-enrolled discipline. It is at our institution at least. I kind of hope that lower ranked schools use this as an opportunity to rise in the rankings. There are still going to be a ton of graduate student applicants and if Princeton won't take them (or use their outlandish offers to sway them elsewhere), then other schools might benefit. If other top institutions do the same, then maybe we'll see some redistribution of top graduate students elsewhere. That's kind of just a pipe dream, though. As you point out, the hiring freeze effect alone could negate all of that.
 
You’re definitely fortunate. One of my students should defend in the Fall. He is planning to do an ethnography of campus LGBTQ centers. That may be on hold with all the uncertainty.

Not sure what will happen with the hires. The policy going into the crisis was that if you lose faculty you keep the money from the lines and can use them how you like. But that was before we added new faculty through campus consolidation including two assistant professors. Our biggest problem was being a top heavy department. For years we had one or no assistant professors. So it’s possible they could say that we got what we got and they don’t owe us the lines. But yeah, there will be plenty of great candidates on the market.
 
I think the real trouble for grad students in the social sciences is going to be the job market in two years. Weirdly, I think this year is going to be the best of the three similarly to how 2008 was a bad job market year, but 2009 and 2010 were just brutal because of the backlogged job applicants. I'm hoping that my advisers can step up in a big way to help me navigate this, though, so we'll see (social capital and whatnot).

big oof. good thing i'm in humanities !
 
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