All it took for me to appreciate UMBC was a pandemic
I never thought I would miss staring at the back of people’s heads for an hour and fifteen minutes, but right now, I would give anything to be in a University of Maryland, Baltimore County classroom. It turns out I took a lot for granted before I experienced the fallout of a pandemic.
As a psychology and media and communications studies dual degree student, I’ve discussed how technology impacts attention spans more times than I’ve dodged geese droppings by the library pond. As recently as February, I scoffed while my professors told me that multitasking isn’t real and that technology distracts people in the classroom. I rolled my eyes impatiently. I figured I knew all of this already.
Smash cut to today. It turns out I wasn’t impervious to the pressures of the multitasking world and the constant desire for stimulus. My screen time is eye-destroyingly high (thanks TikTok), and I have all but given over my life to technology.
I used to be a king of productivity and focus. One of my favorite stories from college involves pulling an all-nighter to complete an essay and project, focusing and participating in class during the day, then cramming for three hours for an exam that I aced within a half-hour, only to almost immediately have to go to a rehearsal for my acappella group.
Now, completing assignments feels torturous, and I spend half of my class worried that I’ll forget to mute myself one of the many times I audibly question why I still have to be in school. And now that I’ve lived through so much, I’m ready to pack it in at twenty years old. When I can go outside, I’d like to retire in Fiji.
I have to play lectures at 1.5 times the normal speed just to stay focused, and even saying that I skim readings is too generous sometimes. I feel the judgments of Netflix every time the “Are you still watching?” sign pops up. Yes, I am still watching. And what of it?
As someone who accidentally signed up for an online class two years ago, I thought I was well equipped for this transition. I told myself I had handled things well before and after all I had gotten an A. I had conveniently blocked out the time I forgot to complete an entire unit my freshman year, but reality shattered my denial pretty quickly, as usual.
But all is not lost for me. I finished the novella I started last year, and have taken up Portuguese while maintaining my Spanish. My family is safe so far. I’m learning to appreciate things and not to take things for granted. Not because celebrities tell me to from their mansions, but because things, for me, could be a lot worse.
I try to remember that when I get my three hundredth email of the day, reminding me that the work, unlike hugs and handshakes, has not disappeared. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure that whenever we are back on campus and I have to trek from my apartment to class, I’ll swear and moan just as much as I used to. But a part of me will know that Hilltop Circle is a paradise compared to the four walls of my childhood bedroom.
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I never thought I would miss staring at the back of people’s heads for an hour and fifteen minutes, but right now, I would give anything to be in a University of Maryland, Baltimore County...
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Mon, 20 Apr 2020 10:00:49 -0400
“Pandemic or not, life happens:” COVID-19 prompts conversation about accommodations
The stress of the COVID-19 pandemic began months ago for Dominique.
Her father, who works at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, told her in February about the growing number of COVID-19 patients they were seeing in the hospital long before the lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders came from governors. Dominique asked to be referred to by only her first name to protect her father’s identity.
“Nobody knew it was here yet, and my dad was already being exposed,” she said. Two weeks ago, the hospital had so many COVID patients and many of her father’s coworkers had contracted the virus, so they began to require many of the employees of the hospital to get tested.
Dominique’s father is a gastrointestinal technician who interacts with many of the hospital patients. He got tested and immediately isolated himself in the basement of their home. “My mom started saying, you have to stay in your room, you can’t come downstairs,” Dominique said. “I didn’t leave my room except to go to the bathroom, and I had no choice but to continue to do my homework.”
During the two week waiting period, Dominque’s father told her that he was experiencing symptoms, including a sore throat and feverish chills. Both Dominique and her father have underlying health conditions and are therefore more susceptible to developing more serious symptoms of COVID-19.
When the negative test results finally arrived, the symptoms, which were likely psychosomatic, disappeared and Dominique’s father returned to work, where he continues to be exposed to the virus.
For Dominique, the two weeks of waiting were agonizing. “I’ve been freaking out since way before we started social distancing. I’m just here doing my homework and thinking about the worst possible outcomes. I don’t have any peace but I’m having to do my work on top of [all of this]. How am I supposed to be in a place to be able to produce good work and to learn when I’m not okay?” she said.
And, she says, the lack of flexibility from some professors is indicative of a greater issue. “Pandemic or not, life happens. I’m having to push aside things I’m having to process just because my professor has a research paper I have to turn in,” she said.
Dominique believes that these problems are evergreen, issues that have been occurring across the board for much of her life. Dominique has ADHD, and after bringing up her learning disability to one of her professors, he told her she would “get good at skimming.” However, Dominique points out that her ADHD causes her to focus on each individual word in an article, making skimming virtually impossible.
During the regular semester, the absence policies from professors vary from class to class. Dominique remembers one professor introducing the syllabus this semester with a warning for students: “don’t get sick.” “What does that even mean? I’ve heard that in other classes, like ‘there’s no such thing as an unexcused absence.’ Ultimately it’s ableist,” she said. “I am emotionally and mentally drained.”
However, other professors, like English lecturer Raymond Terhorst, are actively trying to accommodate students. Terhorst’s positions set him apart from other faculty members, as he continues to commute once a week to his position as a Senior Instructional Designer at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as well as teaching two graduate courses and one undergraduate classes at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
At Hopkins, Terhorst manages a team of educators and works with doctors and nurses as they develop new procedures and protocols. He has most recently worked with an infection control specialist on how to resuscitate a COVID-19 patient because medical professionals cannot give mouth-to-mouth or chest compressions.
Terhorst sees firsthand what healthcare workers are experiencing during the pandemic and, he says he’s interacted with faculty and colleagues who were pretending it was business as usual. “It’s not business as usual,” Terhorst said.
His experience at a hospital in the midst of the pandemic has given him a unique perspective, he says. “Students need to be accommodated all the time, not just during the COVID-19 [pandemic],” he said. “Realistically, there are emergencies going on all the time. We are all myopically focused on our own challenges, but we have to meet people where they are. You just never know what’s going on behind the scenes.”
His team leader at Hopkins had been struggling with breast cancer, and most of Terhorst’s coworkers, including himself, didn’t know until after she died. “No one really knew she had been fighting this for years,” he said. “In my interactions with her, I find myself pondering, ‘was I as patient as I needed to be?’”
Terhorst started his teaching career as an elementary school teacher in Prince George’s County, where he first began to realize the impact that students’ personal lives can have on their performance. Within the classroom, there were often students who fled from civil wars in Africa. After teaching at the elementary school, Terhorst began teaching English as a second language, where he continued to try to understand the student perspective. “Being a teacher of any sort [is] a collaborative relationship and really trying to understand the whole person to the best of one’s ability,” Terhorst said.
In his UMBC classroom, both when classes were meeting face-to-face and now, virtually, he has adjusted his teaching accordingly from flexible deadlines to office hours via email and phone calls and even the elimination of assignments on a case-by-case basis. Terhorst recognizes that many students, like Dominique, have extenuating circumstances.
And Dominique notes that these extenuating circumstances are often present even during the regular school year. During a pandemic, however, things look much bleaker. “It’s making me think a lot about how frustrating the whole university system is. Universities and professors want the show to go on, but you can’t ignore what’s going on. People still have to go to work. You have to treat it like it’s a disaster,” she said.
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The stress of the COVID-19 pandemic began months ago for Dominique. Her father, who works at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, told her in February about the growing number of...
https://retriever.umbc.edu/2020/04/covid-19-pandemic-prompts-conversation-around-student-accommodations/
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Mon, 20 Apr 2020 10:00:21 -0400
APL Multiple Opportunities for New Grads (9315797)