Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

THanks, hope everybody is going to come through this ok. & there sin't another unforeseen coming straight after it.

Would be great if it was able to be taken as a time to rethink not prompting a scramble for more and more austerity and right wing takeovers.

My dad had been in ill health and had to be rushed to hospital. Not sure how things would have panned out if he hadn't died suddenly this is a trying time for everyone .

Taught my first actual class online tonight. Classes are normally 3h20m (with break) but we only took 10 min break and went 6:30 to 9:40pm. EXHAUSTING. Videochatting and sharing my screen and ON 100% for 3 hours staring at a laptop :-/

I sympathize. Tuesday and Wednesday have been exhausting: from recording lectures to answering the endless emails.

ffs one of the other 2 devs and one of the 2 product managers are being furloughed. I am definitely not being furloughed. lucky bastards. they get paid the same and they don't have to work :( meanwhile I will probably have to work harder to cover for them

thinking of everyone at this time who has been hit with the worst.

spain........ wyd

Followed government advice and went out for my first bit of exercise - walking is exercise enough for me. Probably not a good idea to go out in the afternoon as it was no quieter than a reasonably quiet Sunday. I thought I'd go to a nice leafy middle class bit of the neighbourhood for a walk, rather than try to navigate the clueless goons who seem to populate my area. Anyway, I was almost trampled to death by joggers - most of whom make no effort whatsoever to avoid anyone else - and then had a close encounter with a taxi driver who purposefully drove to the centre of the road to intimidate me when I was crossing because I assume he thought I wasn't crossing the road quickly enough. Lovely people, taxi drivers.

I'm so glad we have a treadmill in the apartment. So, so glad.

Taught my first actual class online tonight. Classes are normally 3h20m (with break) but we only took 10 min break and went 6:30 to 9:40pm. EXHAUSTING. Videochatting and sharing my screen and ON 100% for 3 hours staring at a laptop :-/

I sympathize. Tuesday and Wednesday have been exhausting: from recording lectures to answering the endless emails.

I’ve been teaching (tweens) remotely for two weeks now. Video conferences are exhausting Really painful. So much of working with young students is relational, and few of them have social pragmatics in person, let alone on a shared Google Meets Hangout screen with ~ 20 peers they haven’t talked to in weeks.

My day is: wake up, record horrible embarrassing video/screencast, update website, attend various department planning meetings virtually, respond to student emails, develop my curriculum, design and post new supplemental materials based on student need, read and prioritize and respond to emails from parents, special educators, and administrators who are not involved in helping me (but have strong and arbitrary opinions on how I should be doing things), eat lunch, hold virtual office hours for kids, work on next week’s lessons, etc.

My district has decided (and it is a brave and good decision) that we should plan weekly lessons per subject that can be accomplished AWAY from the computer, are non-sequential in case kids miss weeks of school due to family illness, do not widen the equity gap re. technology, and deepen academic skills w/o attempting to shuttle new content into environments we cannot influence. We are not able to enforce or hold students to any deadlines - and one/one conferences are discouraged. And administering classes in a way that honors special education needs is ... very difficult.

For me, the biggest difficulty at the moments is that I’ve just fully contact with some (adored) students. They don’t respond to emails, log into school software, and neither do their parents. They’re often vulnerable kids I mentor, with whom I have formed a 1:1 relationship over the course of many careful years. My only recourse is to turn their names over to a sometimes ham-fisted administration, which I’d prudent but feels like a betrayal.

I'm planning on my kids not having school (at school, at least) for the rest of the year, that's the way things seem to be going. My daughter asked me how they're going to handle grades, given the official policy is that the school work they are doing is not being graded. I have no idea! I guess it depends how things play out.

I'm going to donate blood in a little bit, wish me luck. Life, or at least parts of it, must go on.

we're doing their school's zoom classes and trying to get them to do their assignments but our strategy is just to make sure they're reading a lot and improving in their reading and assuming they can grow in that area i'll consider our corona homeschooling a success.

The test prep/tutoring school I work for has been on online lessons only since February and I just don't think I'm ever gonna like teaching them. I guess 1-on-1 tutoring is not so bad, and I've figured out the best ways to screen share and show explanations, but classes feel like I'm talking into a wall. But it's ok, my school is quickly hemorrhaging students so I don't expect to have a job much longer

For my son, online learning requires our full participation - he tends to wander away, collapse, scream, put yogurt on the screen, etc. - so it is really no different from homeschooling. He really does need to be walked through each assignment. At school, he has an aide for that. Here, it's 100% us.

So sorry Stevolende

Seems my household's quick covid experience was indeed too good to be true - wife still had a mild cough but then caught a regular cold (worse for her than most, she can't sleep when she gets a runny nose) which worsened the cough and for the past few days she's been really coughing her lungs out, it's hurting her and she's having trouble sleeping again. Really frustrating as I can't even run out to get her some syrup (we're still in quarantine).

Blood donation fail: even though neither of the FAQs I looked at, including a new one for the covid era, said I *needed* to make an appointment, it appears they are not accepting walk-ins. But then when you go online to schedule, it lists all the "unavailable" slots and a few slots that don't say anything, but those are *also* apparently unavailable. I told them if the slots that are unavailable say "unavailable" and the slots that don't say "unavailable" are *also* unavailable, then those other slots should really say "unavailable" as well. Anyway, on the plus side, if they didn't have any availabilities that means the drive is going well.

I miss stuff in this thread--condolences/best wishes to various people.

I'm finding Chris Cuomo continuing to do his CNN show every night reassuring. He's not mawkish at all--he strikes just the right balance of humour, daily information on what he's experiencing, and calling out Trump.

my mom's symptoms have thankfully subsided, she had chills and headache for two days but evidently no fever and we are all breathing a deep sigh of relief

thank you for thoughts upthread

“You’re hurting old people like me. Well, not me... I’ll never see you.”

Larry David wants everyone to stay home to protect older Californians from #COVID19!
He does not do these things.
Listen to Larry.#StayHomeSaveLiveshttps://t.co/snYe5v55Rw pic.twitter.com/C5cKOaAufE

— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) March 31, 2020

I just gave myself my first haircut. Successfully, I might add! Considering there isn't much I can do with it in the first place, and there's not much to do it to, has my haircutter been ethically suspect by not just telling me I could easily do it myself? (#larrydavid)

my partner has had three nights in a row of trapped-in-confined-spaces-with-people dreams

Meanwhile, i got this in the mail randomly today.

In the words of Julius Caesar, "oh come on, what the fuck"

https://i.ibb.co/Hn1w4R7/IMG-20200402-130315.jpg

seems legit

Doctor Jones, Jones,
Calling Doctor Jones
Doctor Jones, Doctor Jones,
Get up now

No doubt Dr. Shallenberger's book is bursting with sure-fire recommendations, fully backed by anecdotal evidence.

I didn't read it, come now

Judging from the cover, whatever he is selling, it destroys your knees and elbows.

Solidarity to soda & Alfred & all other ILX educators in the new hellscape

recording lectures without students is even weirder than performing music to an empty room. I have done both and vastly prefer playing music to a pretend audience to trying to cajole invisible people into learning. Teaching my music class was a little easier because it's content, but teaching ESL online has to be one of the more excruciating professional tasks I've attempted. I hope I get better at it!!

At the very least I am happy to brag that I had perfect attendance in both classes. I also had to call every student from my personal phone to get them to show up but it worked!!

yeah I've been teaching ESL over zoom for a couple weeks and it is pretty torturous. my shorter class has had good attendance and I find using the breakout rooms to facilitate conversation works pretty well, but my longer class has only had one or two students which is a huge pain to lesson plan for.

my teacher talking time is way too high lol. but the second week has been better than the first.

you have my genuine sympathies -- i had a class with 3 students once and only 2 would show up at a time, making it impossible for us to get anything done. it was immensely frustrating and that was irl, can't imagine doing that virtually.

we have been using gotomeeting and everyone else on earth uses zoom :( the only thing that is making this tolerable at ALL is that i had 7 weeks to get to know my students and bond with them irl before this went down. i am coasting on that as long as i can.

Had no idea there were so many EFL teachers on here, you can reduce TTT by setting up different interaction patterns by using breakout rooms on Zoom.

Just remembered that the next two weeks are three-day work weeks for me.

I was much more excited about that fact a month ago.

I mentioned it several posts/days/months back, but I bought us one of these:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51RCsC1EReL._AC_SL278_QL70_.jpg

Now when we go for walks we bring along the claw and a bag and pick-up trash. Weirdly satisfying, and definitely makes the people we pass or who see us happy and say nice things. Dunno, kind of a lemonade from life-lemons sort of thing.

camaraderie at arms length to all you online teachers!

(I know someone has commented on how appropriate your user name is before)

it's literally the track I was listening to when I signed up for ilx. but yeah, it seems to get extra meanings all the time for some reason.

I just gave myself my first haircut. Successfully, I might add! Considering there isn't much I can do with it in the first place, and there's not much to do it to, has my haircutter been ethically suspect by not just telling me I could easily do it myself? (#larrydavid)

― Josh in Chicago

I trimmed my wife's hair today! That was a little scary, but she was happier with it than she was with the job she did trimming the bangs on my latest wig.

v happy yr mom is better, Hadrian

v v fortunate i have clippers at home and that i dont mind how i look with a shaved head

The last thing I did before WFH was get a haircut, so I am good for another 2-4 weeks before I even need to think about. After that things could get interesting.

I’m just going for the full early 70s Keith Richards thing, fuck it

I look and smell like the Unabomber

because we're not leaving the flat much and getting no exercise, we've been not wanting dinner as much as usual - not as hungry and also too lazy to cook

that's fine, but it's a bad combo with trying to buy a week of food at once, because there's now a few things in the fridge which are due up & we thought we'd have eaten by today but haven't. feels bad to be wasteful when it's been hard to find fresh food lately and it's been even harder for people who are self-isolating or working shifts etc

oh well, lessons to learn for next time, assuming we don't have to self-isolate ourselves in the meantime

i know this is a mostly apolitical thread but

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is continuing to play down the pandemic, saying it is “not all it’s being made out to be” and denying that any hospital in the country has reached its full capacity due to the outbreak.

Speaking to church ministers outside his official residence in Brasilia, he has urged state governors not to be so “radical,” warning that their confinement and quarantine measures are taking a heavy toll on the economy.

My work situation is enormously complicated by the fact that my longtime work client is going through a 2nd round of chemo for breast cancer. The best thing really would be for the magazine I produce to go on hiatus until late summer or fall so I can get some of this independent contractor unemployment, but she hasn't brought it up and so far neither have I. But this week I've been making the usual first round of contacts for the next issue and have gotten a lot of radio silence. Not "no," but no response at all. I think tomorrow we'll have to have that talk.

Meanwhile my wife is going to drive herself to a nervous breakdown by Being Helpful online.

Pay cuts announced today, executive, director and upper management levels taking a 30% cut, middle mgmt (me) taking 15%, others taking 2 to 5%.

It’s good to still have a job obv and I’ve seen harsher in this thread, but I’m supporting both of us so I’m not, like, rejoicing or anything

Pay cuts announced today, executive, director and upper management levels taking a 30% cut, middle mgmt (me) taking 15%, others taking 2 to 5%.

Maybe I'm too jaded, but I'm genuinely surprised the proportions weren't reversed.

oh i know

at our company, they suspended the annual profit-sharing contribution to the 401(k) (not cancelled as they can't cancel it as it's written into the governing plan doc), they've delayed merit increases but only for people making 75k or more, and they've contributed $1 million to a People Matter fund that can provide relief to employees of up to $2,000 for those severely impacted.

I'm pleasantly surprised how my company has handled this.

everybody fucking calling me today. about to just put my phone on mute.