After Week 1 of Teaching Online

So my students and I have survived the first week of online classes. Some takeaways from this week are:

• Zoom is a great platform for synchronous classes and is easy for class discussions if you have less than 15 students.
• The breakout rooms feature on Zoom is great, but pre-assigning students to rooms hasn’t worked well for me yet. Some students ended up in the correct room, but I had to manually place most of the students in the correct room. It is still a great way for them to have small group discussion.
• Time seems to go faster than expected. In my 2-hour class on Tuesday, I intended to have discussion for the first hour and then give them an assignment for the second hour. We ended up talking the entire time. I definitely need to change that this coming week as many of my students have class from 8 to 12:15 that day and all classes were synchronous!
• In History of Math, I wanted to use COVID-19 as part of our conversation so we did a problem on Monday, where I asked them if every person in South Dakota could have a circle of radius 2 meters around them without the circles overlapping. And, we do have enough room for that—even extra to invite some friends.
• Then I asked the History of Math students to post on the Discussion Board their thoughts on what impact they believe Covid-19 will have on the History of Mathematics. It was an interesting discussion and I appreciated reading their perspectives.
• In our Assessment course, we had our annual Homework Debate, where we assign students to be either Pro Homework or Con Homework. Then they have to argue their side. They did a great job, but it wasn’t as fun as it would have been in person. We were all in agreement that there needs to be some middle ground in homework so they are writing their homework philosophies and homework policies for homework this week.

One question that I have consistently asked my students every class is “how are you doing?” They seem to be doing well, but some of them feel a bit overwhelmed by all of the homework and coursework this week. I am not sure that university faculty understand that we cannot possibly cover the same material as we had originally planned this semester. This is leaving the students tired, overwhelmed, and anxious. I was talking with a middle school teacher and she said that her administrator told them to “take what we were planning and cut it in half, and then cut it in half and assign that.”

How does one tell a colleague that perhaps you are expecting too much of your students without upsetting them?