March 19
March 20
March 21
March 22
WV hair and nail salons and barber shops close
State park lodges close
Secreto has been able to pretty much follow her original lesson plan: after The Iliad , To Kill a Mockingbird , then an assignment she gives students every year to write letters to their future selves—she returns the letters to them, unread by her, when they graduate. Other teachers are uploading videos of their lectures to Schoology, she says, and having live chat sessions with their students. Lecture classes translate easily to the internet, but hands-on classes require more creativity. MHS Family and Consumer Science teacher Brandi Ammons had students in her baking and pastry courses create something delicious at home and upload photos. It was a little challenging to shift her in-class assignments to students’ homes, because she doesn’t know what equipment and ingredients families have. On the other hand, “Many parents have reached out and said that they are thankful for this assignment, because it is one less thing for them to worry about,” Ammons says. She adds, presumably with a smile, “Now some of the mothers are complaining because I am putting a glitch in their diets.” And what about performance classes? MHS choral music educator Lauren Tosh organized a “Masked Singer” show and competition. It replaces the spring concert performance experience. “It also lets them sing solos that they never have an outlet to allow others to hear,” Tosh says. “So many of my students crave these kinds of opportunities.” More than 30 choir students are submitting 1-minute videos of themselves singing behind masks that hide their identities. MHS teachers, administrators, and staff will serve as judges and, after several rounds, one student will emerge as the winner. But this is also a college town, and WVU had half a semester left when classes were suspended in mid-March. Professors had spring break and the following week to get distance-learning materials and
methods in place. Some were already teaching their classes online through the university’s Ecampus system; others had to quickly decide: Should they continue to hold class meetings at specified times, and just shift them online—the “synchronous” model of distance learning that works basically as a virtual classroom? Or should they change their class formats to take advantage of the internet’s “asynchronous” teaching model that lets each student learn when it’s convenient? Facebook groups popped up by discipline—among art and design faculty, among laboratory science faculty—to discuss how to best make the shift. Conventional wisdom in those international discussions—because faculty around the world were facing the same decision at the same time—gravitated toward the idea that everyone was in a crunch, and professors just needed to do what felt most natural for themselves, their students, and their class material. Students in Kirsten Stephan’s field- based Winter Dendrology course were learning 75 tree species and their winter characteristics this semester. The professor of forest resources management decided to simply teach the 15 species the class had yet to learn by photograph. But her Forest Ecology course, based in a greenhouse lab, was not so simple to take virtual. “Students had been growing poplar trees for the entire semester, and their culminating final harvest was going to happen next week.” They’d grown cuttings in various conditions: sand, sawdust, shade, salt water, fertilizer or none. They’d measured stem and leaf biomass twice. They were about to harvest the plants, separate stems, leaves, and roots, and dry and weigh them to determine which growing conditions led the plants to invest in what kinds of growth. Instead, Stephan and her teaching assistant would do that lab work and provide the data to the students.
It’s a required course for forestry majors and for recreation, parks, and tourism resources majors, so the loss of hands-on observation and experience is unfortunate. Students are still expected to master the material, Stephan said. She pointed out one other difficulty with the new approach: It would take her longer than the time she’d expected to spend, but she had half her usual time to devote to it because she and her husband would be tag-teaming with their out-of-school 5- and 7-year-old children. Sculpture professor Dylan Collins has 10 undergraduate students this semester. “It was relatively painless to transition,” he said before classes started back up online on March 30. “They were just beginning some new projects before the break, so I transitioned them to projects using found objects and a project with earthworks”— that’s environmental art with natural materials and photo documentation of the sites. “The students are bummed out about losing the sense of camaraderie and teamwork, and I’m bummed. But I also feel like it’s a good time to talk about ways to document your artwork.” Much college theater and dance instruction works with solutions similar to Toth’s at MHS. “The faculty have been working really hard to come up with alternative exercises and projects,” said Joshua Williamson, director of WVU’s School of Theatre and Dance, before classes started back up online. “Students will be working on monologues and doing scene work at home, whether with parents or maybe with roommates. They can set up an iPhone, film each other, and send it in.” But greater challenges lay behind the scenes. “What do you do with lighting students? What do you do with scene shop? Faculty across the country are solving the same problem at the same time,” Williamson said. “There have been great conversations in online forums sharing ideas. How do you teach something like newsouthmedia.com 57
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