Issue 43. Exit strategies
A story of unforced exile
The soundtrack for this issue is a song by Stacy from our album of the same name, Throwin’ It All Away.
I’ve been dormant on Substack for months. Let me tell you why.
For two years, I planned an exit strategy. Little did I know I’d have to implement it so fast. Let me go back to the beginning. This won’t take too long.
Spring 2020, season of COVID
We are told to stay at home and teach remotely. I’ve had some experience remote teaching before, but this feels sudden and strange, like being a kid at the edge of the diving board the first time, and a joker, a bastard, a kidder cousin shoves you over the edge into the deep. COVID shoved us into the drink, and into Zoom we paddled.
Many of us hate teaching from home. They miss the social interaction, the ego gratification that comes from working with students some of the time. I don’t. I love it. For someone whose hearing aids can only enable me to do the job barely—who constantly treads a high wire waiting to fall because I can’t understand what you’ve said and have to (a) nod dumbly and shrug, (b) ask you to repeat yourself, (c) pretend I understand and get it wrong—the fact that I can teach from home, with headphones on and volume up, is a Godsend.
I don’t love the impact on students. Many are struggling, bad. I loathe the aftershocks, the stunted development, cratered work ethic, and absenteeism.
Fall 2021
We are back on ground, in-person, with required masks strapped behind our ears. The irony slaps me silly. No more lip reading for you, teach!
Besides, winds of change are brewing in higher ed, a rolling thunder coming down the line. There’s chattering and pearl clutching across the land about the looming demographic cliff, enrollments in free fall, financial strangulation, mergers, shut downs. It could happen anywhere.
Funeral drums are tapping behind a parade of end times prophets.
From the ivory tower ramparts, defenders of the faith keep chanting the holy mantra of survival: “Retain! Retain! Innovate! Revamp! Re-invent!” Here’s a curriculum to reform. A plan to pilot. A spade to dig with. It looks a little like a mass grave. Watch your back. Wait for the shove.
