Wow this has been a couple of insane days back to back to back to …. At the beginning of this month my conference was canceled and then it just went downhill from there. There has been a steady stream of crisis management, triage, and confusion. The rules keep changing daily.

Professionally, my first priority is to my students. I tried to give them as much time as I could over the last two weeks. I’ve tried to keep my office door open most of the day. And the students have taken advantage of it. Well about half the students. The other half not so much. And as this crisis was developing maybe we all didn’t appreciate how much it was affecting us. A few of my students just didn’t hand in their take-home exam???

Well when I gave the test back on Monday, something inside just said ROAR! As a class, we had a good 20 minute discussion on stress and hunger (professionally) and who even knows what… The students said it was very motivational. But then one of my students came up to me as we were leaving class and commented “I bet that feels better to get that off your chest“. Had I snapped at my students? I guess all of this stuff was really getting to me too. I talked about overcoming obstacles and how we all have to be hungry all the time – like a shark – but maybe I got a little too intense.

At the beginning of the week, we were told that we had 48 hours to be ready to go online. HAHAHAHA! This was insane on so many different levels. I was immediately worried. How do I help the faculty in my department get online immediately? At a small college, we teach a lot and often have minimal support, which in most cases is fine because we are good at what what we do. While our faculty development team has been awesome, there are only a few of them and many faculty. As I written about earlier in the week on this blog, this turned out to not be too much of a problem. Not only are our faculty putting their courses materials online proactively, they are learning, and converging on the techniques that are right for them. This success was in no small part because of the effort of our lab coordinator James St. John.

What is so unbelievable is how little people outside of academia realize how disruptive this is. This is a big ask. One of my closest friends told me, “Google Classroom. Boom! You’re done… vacation my man!” It’s easy, just take everything that you do that takes months to prepare for, turn it upside down, and put it online in 48 hours, go! Ok, not easy. Because I tend to run toward adventures, I am a little excited about going online, but many people aren’t. There is a lot of uncertainty. A big question, if we go online will we ever come back? Rhett Allain – who is rapidly becoming my newest hero – asked that question today.

Not exactly vacation. More like time to FREAK OUT!

It turned out that the hardest part of the week was “managing” all the chaos; “responding to” or “recovering” might been a better term. I had a number of meetings with stressed out students, staff, and faculty who were looking to me for answers I just didn’t have. I did my best. But in more than one situation, I gave advice that was counteracted immediately. We went from having exams, to no exams, to having exams in person despite the university undergoing a stress test, to exams online, and finally exam cancelled in like 5 hours. I gave everything I had this week. I feel like it wasn’t enough: pandemic, election, global warming, and even a stock market crash. We all worked together and we got stuff done as a team. So even though the stress was high, we did what we needed to.

I have this feeling of just being completely emotionally drained. I thought I was going nuts. Last Friday, I walked in to one of my boss’s offices and basically said “hey I’m going nuts. Help me!” His response was classic. While being exceptionally nice it was basically “that makes sense”. My colleague, Andi Ward, apparently had the same thoughts and tweeted this morning:

As a leader of a biology department, the last 10 or so days has been a time of constant worry about the students, staff, and faculty I work on behalf of. 1/2

— Dr. Andie Ward (@andieward) March 12, 2020

Ok! Finally the university is shut down. Everyone has their marching orders. It’s time to take a day and recharge. I got on the train to head home. Well that was the moment when my cell rings and it’s my wife with a flat tire asking for help. I just screamed, “I HATE 2020!”