From an educational point of view the Coronavirus is generally thought to not be good. All of our classes are online now and not in person. But this is an excellent opportunity to teach. How many times is the entirety of your class all thinking about the same thing?

Having gone to college near Pittsburgh, I can tell you that if the Steelers are in a playoff game, everyone, I mean everyone, is watching the game. (I once went to a Burger King during a game and they only helped us during commercials.) But in New York, it is so diverse, people are rarely thinking the same the thing. Whelp now everyone is. Lets take advantage of it.

I was speaking with a colleague yesterday. In teaching a current events science class the Titanosaurs in the room is Coronavirus. You have to teach towards it. Today in my scientific computation course today we are exploring how to use MATLAB’s built in differential equation solver to “Flatten the Curve”. This is something I talk about often (although in a slightly different way) in terms of population growth and climate change (My honors class activity and tiktok). Friday and Monday we are talking about a recent simulation in the Washington Post of how the Coronavirus spreads.

It doesn’t matter where you are going for media terms like “Flatten the Curve” and “Exponential Growth” are being used sometimes correctly and sometimes not everywhere. I think 90% of the tiktok videos on my For You Page are coronavirus related. (I really like the ones where the doctor tells someone that they have the Coronavirus and they are confused because they already have so much toilet paper.) Now we are able to drive home the usefulness of complicated and abstract mathematics in a meaningful way.

Trigger Warning: So as a physicist, I can honestly tell you that this is the first time that I have ever thought about giving a “trigger warning”. I am not sure if we are there yet, but I imagine we will be soon. New York is one of the epicenters for this pandemic. It is in our backyard. We are going to have family members and colleagues that are going to be affected by it. While I think it will be good to talk about all of this stuff openly, we have to prepared for stuff we really can’t prepare for. Being honest with our students is a great thing.