Hello Zoom my old friend…
Well pretty much it looks like we are heading for another lockdown or partial one anyway. Mumbai hit 15K cases today which is more than ever before even at the height of the Delta wave in March and April. Silver-lining is that this Omnicron seems alot milder but that isn’t going to stop thousands being infected every single day. India cases are up to almost 100,000 which probably means a good four times that number as testing is never enough and people are giving up on testing anyway. Since the virus is mild, people are getting symptoms and just sitting put at home and riding it out. Who wants to be a statistic anyway?
As a person who works in a Higher education institute here it means that we are staring another gap in offline, campus based education. The State here closed all higher education institutions for a little over a month and honestly probably more as Governments are usually fast to close things and slow to open them. Particularly in Maharashtra. So exams are going online which means a field day for students who don’t really need to study, despite the best software tricks, and only need to concern themselves with having enough typing stamina to complete their paper within the three hours given. It is a mess as online education and assessment is, but for us as teachers, this reality is now something we are used to. It has been now almost two full years since we had anything like normal education practices. From March 2020 onwards the whole thing has been a series of ‘best guess’ hacks and then playing catch up when we can get on campus, only for it to be cruelly taken away again as another wave blows up.
It is exhausting. I know no one has it worse than health-care workers as they have been just non-stop throughout the last twenty-four months but it has not been easy for teachers. Planning, replanning, testing, retesting, Zoom, hybrid and god knows what else has been done, redone and tried and retried. Always trying to do their best in circumstances that were new, unprepared, untested and to add to this a sliding scale of student interest, interaction and mental health. It has been a battle and one I am not sure there are any winners in, just a holding of ground at best.
I truly hope that this break from on-campus activities is not a long one. It strikes me that students we took in for admission in 2020, are now entering their fourth semester of study having spent less than three months on the campus and that two in a some watered down way. It just isn’t fair on these kids, who are missing out on some foundational experiences. Sure they have found friends and I don’t doubt those bonds are strong but what about the bond to the college? This will be missing with most I fear and for an institution like our, this is a very big miss as we pride ourselves on that connection. Hopefully we can try to make up for some lost time, but as long as there is always a threat of disturbances due to new mutations or new waves hitting the population, I am not sure in what capacity that can be done and how far it can be repaired. I guess we will have to wait and watch.
Stay safe everyone.
