Jenny Spinner is reworking assignments for the journalism seminar she’s suddenly teaching online. She’s grappling with how to use media coverage of the coronavirus pandemic as a learning opportunity without asking students to follow it so closely that it harms their mental health. And because Spinner also runs her department’s internship program, she’s advising students whose work experiences have been upended.
Spinner, a professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, in Philadelphia, is doing all of that from a home office she now shares with a 10-year-old whose school, like the university, has moved to emergency online instruction due to the coronavirus. Well, when she’s not hiding out from him and her three other sons, ages 6, 13, and 17, in the bathroom so that she can try to concentrate.
The coronavirus pandemic, like many a crisis before it, is revealing problems, like the toll of attempting work/life balance, that have been there all along. “As I breast-fed my children and also was an academic, I’ve shut myself up in my office and closed the door,” Spinner says. “And I’ve been a parent where no one could see me.” For many years, Spinner carefully separated her personal life from her professional one. “Here,” she says, “the walls are down. I’m here with my struggles.”
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Having both children and an academic career is already challenging. But now many professors are juggling at least three jobs, says Julie Sievers, director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern University, in Texas. They still have their regular jobs, which include research, teaching, and service. They’re also taking a crash course in online instructional design. And they’re now providing full-time child care — and, in some cases, schooling.
“What it’s going to look like to do all of this at the same time is sometimes hard to imagine,” Sievers says. “I think everyone’s doing their best.”
Spinner knows her family is lucky. Both parents are able to be home. The kids’ schools have plans for continuing instruction and have provided devices that they can use to complete it. They live in a house, not an apartment, so she has space. “Being able to hide,” she says, “is a privilege.” With four children and 17 years of parenting experience, Spinner says, she’s used to being physically exhausted. The challenge now, she says, is “mental exhaustion and the inability to carve out space for my brain to do my best work.”
Spinner has a lot on her mind. One thing she’s not worried about? “My kids showing up during my Zoom class meetings.” Spinner is already open with students about the challenges of being both parent and professor, she says, “because I think it’s important for them, especially for my women students, not to think that I’ve got it all together.”
Watching a Lot of Netflix
No one has it all together right now, and some things will have to slide.
For Erin K. Anderson, one of those things is trying to gather her students online during their class time. Anderson, an associate professor of sociology and chair of the department at Washington College, in Maryland, is not very comfortable with technology. Her schedule is challenging. And her college is in a rural location where not everyone has reliable internet access. “I just realized really early on I was going to have to just give up any idea of having any sort of real-time interaction with the students,” she says.
Another thing Anderson is letting slide: her kids’ schoolwork. Anderson and her husband, a middle-school special-education teacher, are fortunate to both be able to work from home while their 8- and 10-year-olds are out of school. Even so, she says, “in all honesty, they have been watching a lot of Netflix and playing some games on their tablets.”
Because they live in a rural area with limited internet access, Anderson says, local schools are not expecting students to do coursework online. Given their parents’ professions, she says, her children are a little bit ahead at school anyhow. She is confident they will be all right.
Besides, work and child care aren’t her only responsibilities. Anderson’s 79-year-old father recently had back surgery and just came home from the hospital this week. Anderson plans to stay at his home, two miles from hers, during his recovery, and has recently had internet service installed there so she can work. She’ll go back and forth to visit her husband and children.
Her situation is plenty complicated, but Anderson wonders how other families are supervising, much less educating, their children. How are the nurses and the police officer who live in her neighborhood doing this? Or families with lower incomes? “I’m not entirely certain what they’re doing with kids who are out of school for two or longer weeks,” she says.
Stark Divides
Those kinds of differences in families’ situations are among the reasons the pandemic is poised to deepen inequalities. Jessica Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington, wrote a book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford University Press, 2018), about the student, parent, and school behavior that drives those disparities.
The issue has been on her mind as she designed her remote courses, a large introductory one and another one on ethnographic research methods for graduate students. Given students’ unequal access to course materials, among other things, she has told her undergraduates that none of them will get a lower grade than whatever they had when in-person instruction ended. That makes all of the assignments for the rest of the semester effectively optional. Similarly, she has scaled back her assignments for graduate students and given them a number of options for completing the term.
Calarco has also thought about the inequities families experience at home. Her own situation is chaotic. Calarco’s husband is chief of staff for the university’s vice president for information technology, meaning he’s involved in nearly every IT decision related to its response to the pandemic. They also have two small children, the older one a kindergartener who is supposed to be completing schoolwork at home. Calarco has a Ph.D., but there’s already been one worksheet with instructions that took her a while to decipher, and printing out the school worksheets broke the family printer.
“My big takeaway here,” Calarco says, “is that if families like mine that are incredibly privileged” — healthy, employed and getting paid, well resourced — are finding this hard, “I can only imagine how much harder it must be for other families that have much more limited resources, especially when it comes to providing at-home learning support for kids.”
Not every college professor, of course, is on the advantaged side of this divide. Cassia Gammill is a contingent faculty member who teaches at two institutions: a composition course at Clark College, in Washington State, and a general-education course on popular culture at Portland State University. Gammill is an experienced online instructor who was already going to teach one of her courses online. Still, she’s dealing with two colleges’ different responses to the pandemic. She is paid by the course and hasn’t been compensated for the work of redesigning one for a new form of delivery. The future of her employment, should enrollment fall, as many anticipate, is uncertain.
Gammill is also a single parent of a 10-year-old. Generally, if she needs backup child care, Gammill might turn to her mother, but she’s in an age group at higher risk of getting seriously ill from Covid-19. For a while, Gammill planned to team up with another single parent, sharing child-care responsibilities. But the other family is in self-quarantine after exposure to someone who tested positive for the virus.
So Gammill and her daughter are on their own. At first, Gammill hoped she could find two-hour chunks of time to work during the day. “But two hours is just too long of a stretch of time to expect her not to interrupt me, I’m finding,” Gammill says. As a result, she’s getting a lot of her work done before her daughter wakes up and after she goes to bed, and running on inadequate sleep.
Gammill is under a lot of stress. But she has to hold it together, because so is her daughter, who misses her friends and has been crying. “I can see her starting to get depressed,” Gammill says.
At a time like this, Gammill says, a parent has to keep up morale. “You can’t let the relationship between the two of you go sour or get difficult,” she says. “You’ve really got to prioritize that relationship and buoying them.”
Focusing on What You Can Control
Andrew Gardner-Northrop was already busy, teaching as an adjunct at Saginaw Valley State University, in Michigan, on top of a full-time job as a therapist and manager of therapists at a primary-care office and parenting a 13-month-old. But his profession has equipped him with good coping strategies.
Like many families, Gardner-Northrop’s has found their house growing crowded. He and his husband, a teacher, are both mostly working from home, though Gardner-Northrop does have to go into his office occasionally for his full-time job. Their son’s day care is closed. Gardner-Northrop doesn’t have a dedicated home-office space, so he often works from his son’s playroom. But for video chats, he decamps to the living room, to “have a nice background where it’s just a solid wall with a nice picture instead of a ton of toys,” and he sends his husband and son to the basement, where they don’t have to worry about keeping quiet.
The logistics are complicated, but the family is also worried about the virus itself. Because his son was born prematurely, Gardner-Northrop takes extra precautions to avoid exposing him to the virus, leaving his clothes in the garage and immediately taking a shower upon his return from the primary-care office.
This is an anxious time to be a parent — an anxious time to be a person. As a therapist, Gardner-Northrop has tools for facing it. Focus on what you can control, like how to teach online, not the fact that it must be done. Pick just one thing you want to accomplish each day. “One goal that I had was that I wanted to clean out our freezer,” he says. “That’s a boring goal. But if I could clean out the freezer, that would be a successful day.”
That’s a much lower bar than academics usually set for themselves. And it’s the same one, Gardner-Northrop adds, they should be setting for their students this semester.
