Teaching in the Times of COVID-19 Part Two: Tips for Adapting to Online Teaching

I have been sitting at my computer on and off for several days immobilized. Everyone is home, so we are searching for a new routine, a new sense of balance and ways to fend off the quiet panic we feel. As Spring Equinox passed yesterday, almost unnoticed, it was hard to see it a symbol of light and life, and new beginnings.

And yet, with social distancing, I already see creative changes in my children that give me hope. My 13-year-old has been teaching himself new songs on piano and guitar, baked dessert for everyone, and entertained the other children (we are a self-isolation pod with our next door neighbours) for hours – all self-initiated. While it is a time of worry and fear, I am thinking about ways to take this opportunity to nurture creativity and develop new ways of learning.

I have been sitting at my computer on and off for two days immobilized. Everyone is home, so we are searching for a new routine, a new sense of balance and ways to fend off the quiet panic we feel. As Spring Equinox passed yesterday, almost unnoticed, it was hard to see it a symbol of light and life, and new beginnings.

And yet, with social distancing, I already see creative changes in my children that give me hope. My 13-year-old has been teaching himself new songs on piano and guitar, baked dessert for everyone, and entertained the other children (we are a self-isolation pod with our next door neighbours) for hours – all self-initiated. While it is a time of worry and fear, I am thinking about ways to take this opportunity to nurture creativity and develop new ways of learning.

Kelsey’s previous post provided a great overview of resources for teaching in the times of COVID-19. As I drink coffee with my husband (https://adamhenderson.ca/) who is preparing to teach his classes online for Vancouver Film School and UBC’s BFA Theatre program, we ponder what more might be helpful to instructors of theatre and performance classrooms who are suddenly tasked with transferring face-to-face classes to online experiences. Here are our best thoughts:

1. Use this time as an opportunity to teach useful career skills.

• how to record effective self-tapes (for auditions or otherwise)
• how to record a voice demo
• how to set up a home recording booth or video area
• how to write a blog post
• how to create a short promotional video
• how to create a slick online slide presentation
• how to effectively facilitate a group chat

2. Consider creating imaginative online activities.

Brainstorm with your classes. Here are some fun ideas:

• Create a social distancing festival (e.g. https://www.socialdistancingfestival.com/?fbclid=IwAR2zB93jqWeUHFQKodoW2zbi4bu9H6FQxdImn0g-2kLQWsIgmbm8hmMnabk)

• Do a 24 hour monologue challenge (e.g: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/24-hour-plays-launch-viral-monologues-1284985?fbclid=IwAR0Mvu_G3qQittI9pH18zc0ZJknH8Fi52qcG7UYVycYn_tIiUNP3LdAHzhg)

• Create collaborative work (writing, filming, podcasting, music). Have one person start a project and pass it on for others to add to. It does not have to be high tech! Here’s my friend and I learning harmonies to a song at a distance:

3. Make use of the many livestream broadcasts going on.

These include play readings, concerts, film festivals, dance classes etc. I don’t want to overload readers with examples, but a quick google search with produce many hits. While livestreams don’t replace face-to-face experiences, they may help achieve the elements of unpredictabiity, surprise, and perhaps even communion that are unique to liveness.

4. Make use of new and previously existing online databases

Many resources have now been made available for free. Here are a few theatre-related resources that might come in handy:

• The National Theatre’s many theatre-related videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/ntdiscovertheatre

• The Stratford Festival’s Meighan Forum Livestream database of discussions about theatre: https://www.stratfordfestival.ca/WatchandExplore/StreamingLive

• Brock University’s Diversities in Actor Training videos (https://brocku.ca/diversities-in-actor-training/)

• Journal Databases like JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/) have expanded their public access sections which might be useful to acting schools without institutional subscriptions.

 5. Allow yourself to do what is reasonable and achievable to finish up courses           in progress.

We all want to deliver good value to our students, but it is not reasonable to adapt an entire course to a slick online format. Here’s a thoughtful resource by Rebecca Barrett-Fox (don’t be put off by the title): “Please do a bad job of putting your class online.”

We’ll get through this together with, I hope, with kindness and generosity. Now for another learning opportunity, here are a variety of 20 second selections of Shakespeare for hand washing:

Interview: Charlotte Canning

At the beginning of 2020, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Charlotte Canning, professor in the Performance as Public Practice stream and Head, Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism at the University of Texas Austin’s Department of Theatre & Dance. We had a lively, fascinating, conversation about pedagogy, teaching-teachers, and teaching as public practice. The first part of the chat is below, with the second part to follow next week!

Dr. Charlotte Canning

KB: Can you introduce yourself? What’s your current position, and what sort of teaching do you do?

CC: I am the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor in Drama and have been on the faculty in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin since 1993.

One of the courses I teach is “Supervised Teaching.” This is a very bland title and an inaccurate description of the class. The class itself is really an introduction to teaching for graduate students. It’s required by the university. In our program, it is a very important part of our core curriculum because we invest very heavily in teaching as a mode of public engagement for scholars. We talk a lot about the scholar-artist-citizen-activist. Teaching is absolutely, in our opinion, central to that formulation.

It has really been an important course for the Performance as Public Practice students. Although, I should point out, it’s not just our students in the class. It’s for any graduate student in the department. That’s terrific, because it means we’ve got folks in the room who are coming from a range of disciplines. Unlike in, say, the history department, where everyone will teach history of some kind, when I taught it in fall 2019 I had playwrights, actors, dramaturgs, scholars and so on. So, you’re really having to think about pedagogy in certain kinds of holistic and heterogenous ways.

KB: Wow. I have attended several different graduate programmes and have never experienced that kind of a class. From the student’s perspective, what’s the feedback back been? What’s most useful? Least useful?

CC: I’m not sure what they think is the least useful. They’re too savvy to say that to me! But, from their comments, what I get is that one of the things they really value is the part of the class that they call the “micro-teach.” For the micro-teach, you submit a lesson plan for an entire day and then you teach ten minutes of that lesson plan to the class.

In Performance as Public Practice, this course rotates between three of us who teach it, depending on yearly schedules, etc. We share the same syllabus but each tweak it every time we get it. This year, I had the students work on creating a rubric for evaluating teaching. This was, in part, to demonstrate how, even though they’re useful, in a way, rubrics don’t really work. The exercise of creating it, using it, and then evaluating it was enormously helpful. It helped the students see that you do the best you can when you’re designing a rubric and then, in practice, you see what you should’ve valued and didn’t.

A randomly searched general essay marking rubric because … oh rubrics.

So, for the “micro-teach”, we had the rubrics that the students created plus colleague evaluations. I took notes as they taught. I evaluated the lesson plan and the self-evaluation they did. So, the feedback they got back was really comprehensive and, I think, really valuable.  They would love to do it twice but unfortunately there’s just not enough time in a semester to do the micro-teaches twice.

KB: What do you focus on in your feedback to these students?

CC: I try to do it in the context that we can all learn how to do this. Nobody was born knowing how to teach despite all the sentimental claptrap that’s out there. So, with each student, I push hard for them to think about how they can be an effective teacher. What, exactly, do they have? What do they bring to the table in the classroom that is very much theirs? Within each situation, I try to figure out how to support the direction in which they’re developing. I’m really lucky in that I’ve never taught the class where the students aren’t 100% committed. So, I’m never saying anything completely negative in my feedback. It’s more, “Take this and keep going” or “Don’t be afraid to do it, that was great.”

KB: What have you learned from teaching teachers?

CC: I don’t know what the teaching version of an editor is called, but in the same way that teaching writing makes you a better editor, I think teaching to teach — teaching teaching, you might call it — makes you a better teacher. That’s certainly been true for me. My syllabuses and assignments have gotten clearer and sharper. Teaching teaching makes me pause more often and be less sure  of myself – in the right way! Not a lack of confidence, but in the sense of being willing to stop and say, is that the right reaction? Is that what we should be doing? And, if the answer is no, it doesn’t undo me. I don’t feel like “oh my God, now I’ve done something terrible.” It’s like, “oh, okay, yeah, this needs to change.”

I have this story I tell. A few years ago, I was team-teaching a class with a colleague. It was online. We were doing a unit on acting. In the middle of it, we said, “Everybody stand up.” As we did that, I suddenly thought, “We have 700 students, we don’t know if all of them can stand up.” It gave me pause. We were ableists. But, it also made me ask: What do we mean when we ask the students to stand up? What do we mean theoretically? What do we mean in terms of what we expect to happen? I realized it was a physical coming to attention. It was about shifting the circumstances.

If I hadn’t made that mistake, I wouldn’t have truly thought through what I meant by “stand up” or confronted my ableist bias. That’s the kind of analytical skill that I’ve gained as a teacher by teaching teaching. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to think that through as well if I hadn’t had to be in front of students and talk about teaching all the time.

KB: I love that story. I feel like some of my best reflections have come from moments of breakdown. Those moments, while sometimes uncomfortable, have forced me to question myself: What was I trying to do there? What did I actually do? What’s the relationship between those two things. 

CC: Right! In this case: how do you shift the circumstances without depending on a single type of physical action? Is the physical action even the point?

KB: And, of course, it’s not.

CC: That was a great moment in terms of me thinking through what am I trying to do and why. That kind of reflection and evaluation is what I’ve got from teaching teaching.

***

Don’t forget to check back next week for the second half of the interview, in which Charlotte and I chat about public teaching, feminist pedagogy, and books!

Teaching in Times of COVID-19: A Resource List

“Beware the Ides of March,” warned the soothsayer.

He, of course, was talking to Ceasar in Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar, but his words are eerily resonant.

Up until last week, COVID-19 had largely been framed as what Lauren Berlant might call a “situation” – “a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amid the usual activity of life” – outside of China. This week, that changed.

Officially declared a pandemic, COVID-19 went from situation to crisis in the span of a few days, and government, institutional, and personal responses have hurled us into a collective impasse, a “stretch of time” in which “the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things …” (Berlant 4).

The graph that shapes the current COVID-19 response

As is often the case with such situations, the material effects of this impasse are unevenly distributed.

For theatre and performance folks, it is a stark reminder that much of our work takes place in, and relies on, the public, both its spaces and its people. Work has shut down (or shifted) alongside public closures: productions and conferences have been cancelled; studios and theatres have been closed; universities are largely shut down; courses have been moved online; and primary and secondary schools have been closed, putting extra child-care pressure on those with kids.

While these closures and the call to social distance are critical, they nevertheless have profound material and financial impacts that foreground how many of our workers, artists, and teachers are on gigs and contracts, or are seasonally or otherwise precariously employed.

If there is anything heartening about this impasse (and there are actually many things), one is that people are banding together to help one another.

Several resources are actively being compiled to support instructors who suddenly have to shift to online learning.

We’ve annotated five such resources and listed them below:

1. Teaching theatre in the era of COVID-19: Reach out and Help Someone (Digitally)  

This is a collaborative document originally created by Maria Aladren, Stage Director and Academic Specialist in Theatre, Union County College. It includes a list of activities, ideas, and resources for teaching a range of elements of theatre and performance through online platforms.

2. Teaching Theatre Online: A Shift in Pedagogy Amidst Coronavirus Outbreak

Originally created by Dr. Daphnie Sicre, Loyola Marymount University, this is a second list of activities, ideas, and resources for teaching a range of elements of theatre and performance through online platforms.

3. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Resource List

A list of (largely) American-based links to a range of theatre-related sites.

Credit: https://bozell.com/social-distancing-for-social-people-and-others/

4. The National Film Board of Canada & The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning, and Online Collections

I’ve chunked these two non-theatre specific resources together.

While not theatre-specific, Canada’s NFB has a wealth of interesting, free, artistic content available online. For Canadian instructors, it’s almost always a useful resource to remember.

The latter is a (frankly overwhelming) list of virtual museum and e-learning resources. It’s one that’s good to “favourite” for now or for later, as it compiles lots of information in one place.

5. Your Institutional Mental Health Services 

So, this is clearly cheating, but as the uncertainty of the COVID-19 impasse intersects with end of term stresses, and the (potential) isolation of social distancing, mental health and well-being needs to be a focal point of conversations for both students and instructors. While not always the case, many institutions offer discounted (and sometimes free) access to online counselling and therapy through their health plans and wellness hubs. A quick search will help you identify resources that you might send to students and also resources that you might use yourself or share with colleagues.

Stay healthy: wash your hands, be well at home, and check in with your neighbours and students, especially if they are feeling at risk.

 

 

 

Do we need to wait four more years? Lessons from The Wolves

Last night, Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary race, leaving Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders to duke it out for a shot at Agent Orange in November. She was the last of a remarkably diverse group of contenders, ground-breaking numbers of whom were women. I read, crestfallen, all the commentary on the “fall” of Warren last night and this morning, as it tried to remind me that, in the end, being smart, experienced, level-headed, and a powerfully galvanizing public speaker was not enough, is never enough, for a women to overcome the “electability” factor.

Sitting at lunch yesterday with a feminist friend and colleague from the states, we commiserated; “I don’t think we will see a female president in our lifetime,” she said.

These are The Wolves; keep reading. (Photo from the Howland Company production at Streetcar Crowsnest, Toronto, October 2018)

As she reached the final stages of this primary race, Warren stood unabashedly for every smart and capable woman who has ever been asked to stand down, implicitly or explicitly, because of her gender. She was a warrior on the stage, calling out privilege and hypocrisy. In one of my favourite moments from the primary race, she asked an Iowa debate crowd to look around them: “Collectively,” she said, the men on stage with her “have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in, are the women, Amy and me.”

True to this fighting form, Warren’s concession speech last night spoke directly to the pedagogical consequences of her departure. “One of the hardest parts of this,” she said as she conceded the competition, “is all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years.”

Four more years? Or right f#$king now? The Wolves burst forth off Broadway in September 2016.

Given America’s penchant for supporting diversity in theory, and then choosing male, White supremacism in practice, I’m not sure four more years (as my friend and colleague noted) is going to do it. And the US is hardly alone here; Canada has had but one female prime minister, Kim Campbell, and she was the “fall guy” who took the political hit after the collapse of Brian Mulroney’s neoliberal Tories in the early 1990s. There are lots of other examples I could cite from the political landscapes of the so-called “developed West” (Julia Gillard, anyone?), but I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

(Thank heavens for, and long live the reign of, Jacinda Ardern, and shout out to the amazing women fighting for political justice in so many other countries around the world.)

So: let’s turn away from politics for a bit, and let’s think about that charge of four more, long years.

What can, and will, our young women learn in those four years about their strength and their power, as well as about the consequences of that old patriarchal saw, “likability”? How might we foreground – give space and light and air and time to – the former, and use them to challenge the misogynist perniciousness of the latter? What tools are already in place for us to share different kinds of lessons about our collective feminist capability, about young women’s overwhelming strength?

It so happens, this week of all weeks, that I spent part of Monday reading a terrific play, The Wolves, by Sarah DeLappe. The Wolves follows the eponymous team of indoor soccer players, nine 16- and 17-year old young women, through the winter bowels of their season. They warm up, play, and warm down again; get sick and get better; discuss the difficult material they are learning in school (the show opens with a volley about the ethical complexities of the Khmer Rouge!); talk frankly about both their bodies (pads or tampons?) and about their creepy coach (who once asked them to warm up in their sports bras… He never appears on stage; he’s plainly not a factor in their incredible on-field success.). Finally, they weather a terrible accident together.

Contrasting shots of the same moment, Still Life with Orange Slices: off Broadway, left, and at Streetcar Crowsnest, right.

Across five scenes we watch them be, variously, athletes, students of the world, and complex individuals, together; there are tougher girls and quieter girls, the brainy girl and the new girl, but nobody is a stereotype – no-one is just one thing. They are a group, finding their (incredible, near-unbeatable!) strength together, coordinating their play together, growing into their power together. They are vulnerable but they are also a team of winners – and they know it.

I’m currently writing about The Wolves for a collection of essays about sports and performance; I was invited to contribute by colleagues who know I have a side-line in feminist sports writing. (If you’re reading this on Fit is a Feminist Issue, please check out The Activist Classroom, my other online home!) I gamely said yes to this invitation because the topic interested me, but I didn’t suggest The Wolves as my focus; the editors handed it to me, and until this week I hadn’t realized what a remarkable piece of teaching – let alone what a great piece of drama – it is.

Lots of young women have poor memories of grade-school gym class, and conflicted, if not difficult, memories of playing on sports teams as adolescents or teenagers. My own memories of childhood softball and floor hockey, high school track (VERY briefly), and university rowing (ditto) are of a reproduction of failure: I was larger than the average girl, I felt awkward in my body, my hand-eye coordination was a bit crap, and I received the kind of feedback from coaches (as opposed to, say, actual coaching from coaches…) that reaffirmed my cementing view of myself (fat/uncoordinated/not a good enough girl on-field or off). Eventually, even when I think (now) I could have succeeded brilliantly (track; rowing), I gave up, because I couldn’t overcome that inner sense of failure – not just failure as an athlete, but failure as a woman.

(Side note: none of the coaches I worked with helped, not women nor men. Amazing how well we reproduce patriarchy on the sports field, when we aren’t thoughtful about our words and actions! I can empathize fully with the Wolves; I’d have left my coach in the stands too, if I could have.)

Hard play means conflict; negotiation; team work is hard. But these sisters are doing it for themselves – no creepy male coach required.

The Wolves ends with the kind of plot twist you might expect in a lesser piece of work, but as in its handling of young women athletes, here it defies expectations. Nothing gets wrapped up. Fights are not resolved; they are just sidelined while the team holds space for one another, with imperfect generosity. The young women warm up, move their bodies together, and talk. Then, all of a sudden, one of the team’s moms appears.

She is the only “adult” in the show, and she’s onstage only for about five minutes. But this is long enough for her to interrupt this young women’s space, this circle of astroturf and passing games and honest, difficult girl talk. She seizes the space, not aware at all of how she’s usurped it. The teammates sit and listen, stunned but unfailingly kind. Eventually, she leaves, and they elect to chant their battle cry. Huddled together, faces away from us, their song builds, their bodies bounce, then jump, then fly: WE. ARE. THE. WOLVES. WE! ARE! THE! WOLVES!

Rehearsing for The Wolves in New York, 2016. 

I wonder, this morning, whether Elizabeth Warren is maybe that soccer mom at the end of the play. Whether she has perhaps underestimated the circle of women around her, misread the signs. Do we need to wait four more years to put a woman into “real” power, to overcome the ridiculous bullshit that is the “electability” factor? Maybe, but maybe not. Perhaps we need to look away from the old messaging, and perhaps we also need to look toward new spaces to locate the women’s power that we can’t yet fully see. In Sweden, Greta Thunberg started skipping school, sat down in front of a government building, and started a global movement. On their suburban astroturf in the dead of winter, The Wolves sounded their battle cry, and changed the shape of “girl plays” forever.

Let’s listen to these powerful young voices, honour them in the spaces they have adopted as their seats of power, and encourage them to re-conceive what power means – over the course of these next four years, and beyond.

Not planning on waiting,

Kim

 

On Parenting and Academia – Part Two

On Parenting and Academia – Part Two

As promised, here is the second half of our new Writer in Residence Julia Henderson’s post on parenting in academia!

***

Thanks to those who reached out to me in response to my last (Feb. 24) post!

I was a little nervous to admit my struggles balancing work and family. However, hearing from others has reinforced for me how often we think we are the only ones having difficulty finding balance, but in reality, there are many others are also feeling divided, overtaxed, less-than-perfect, and hesitant to admit it.

In my previous post, I tried to think about the value parenting adds to scholarship and teaching. Nonetheless, there is still the ever-present role conflict that accompanies being a parent and an academic.

So, this week I follow-up with some practical advice geared toward surviving the combined pressures of parenthood and academia. These tips may seem like common sense, but most of them I personally had to learn by failing forward.

Though these suggestions originated in thinking about parenting, I hope some of them might be applicable to others who have high non-work demands on their time, and increased likelihood of unpredictable events throwing off their schedules. I am thinking, for example, of academics caring for elderly parents, scholars with pets that need unexpected care, or people with personal health challenges themselves.

Thanks again to Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, of McEwan University, and Katrina Dunn of University of Manitoba for contributing their ideas to this post. Thanks, too, to Melissa Poll, Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, for her thoughts.

Hot Tips for Surviving as a Parent in Academia:

1. Invest time (and money if you have it) in a good childcare situation (this also goes for pet care or eldercare). It can make your life a LOT easier to have daycare at your institution or in your home neighbourhood. Put your child on waitlists as early as possible. Melissa Poll reminds us that, especially for scholars in contingent positions, childcare can be difficult to afford. She has found it helpful to make friends with other parents and exchange child care. She also recommends, if you can, to ask relatives to help out when you’re approaching a particularly busy time. Relatives love you and your children. They want to see you thrive.

My youngest son’s daycare graduation last June!

2. Try hard to eat well and get enough sleep. Sounds simple! In reality, it can be a big ask. Heather Fitzsimmons Frey puts it well, “I cannot teach, do research, or parent when I haven’t had enough sleep. . . my children remind me that a lack of sleep is not sustainable.

Pictures taken on the same day before and after a long nap
(okay, I also used makeup and a filter in the second one, 
but they really were taken on the same day 🙂

3. Make the most of the time you do have. Melissa Poll provides some good examples: “Multi-task. Listen to keynotes, audio books, or academic podcasts while doing the laundry or cleaning that strange stain on the rug. Work when you know your kids will be asleep for a while, whether in the early morning or after bedtime. Make the most of short intervals of free time. Send one email. Mark a paper.”

4. Schedule a specific prep time for your classes and stick to it. Don’t over prepare. The last time I taught Intro to Theatre, I experimented with giving myself a 2.5-hour prep time for a 1-hour session (including responding to student emails and reviewing reflections). It worked very well and my evaluations did not suffer.

Kim recommends pattern teaching prep models: they are a time and life-saver.

5. If you and your partner are both post-secondary instructors, try to organize your schedule so both partners do not start teaching first thing in the morning on the same day. It will make school and daycare drop-offs much less stressful. I find starting work at the same time is fine as there can still be minor flexibility, but starting to teach at the same time creates a cyclone of stress. I try to put a flag in my calendar about 3 months before the start of a new term to work this out with my colleagues (of course this timeline will vary depending on your institution).

6. Have a system for sharing your family members’ schedules. My husband and I both keep Gmail calendars and share them with each other. It saves time as we can quickly check the other’s schedule without having to ask. They also sync with all of our devices. Sharing shopping lists also saves a lot of time and helps with lunches – my family uses the app Our Groceries. My hungry 13-year-old can add things to the list when he finishes them off (which happens often)!!

My family’s shared shopping list

7. If possible, assert your parenting needs to your administrative staff and Chair. However, give yourself a break for feeling intimidated about doing this too: the more junior you are (especially if you are precariously employed), the more hesitant you might feel to make too many requests. You can always consult your faculty association if you are unsure about what a reasonable request might be. In my case, my husband has worked at his institution much longer than I have at mine, so he is the one to ask for flexibility like shifting his work schedule to accommodate the teaching times I am assigned, or taking time off for sick children.

8. One of my favourite bits of advice, compliments of Katrina Dunn, is: “Only sign your kids up for activities with waiting rooms that have really strong Wi-Fi signals.” This is brilliant. Not only will your kids be happy, you can do work while you wait for them!

9. Take your kids to shows. Get their opinion and perspective. Don’t be afraid to put a TYA show on your syllabus. Take your pre-teen to adult theatre. Talking about theatre with your kids is great practice for class.

My kids on the set of Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver produced by United Players of Vancouver, and directed by my husband, Adam Henderson (my older son saw the show)

10. Have a workspace that is your own. Make it pleasant, desirable, inspiring. Have it filled with things that bring you joy, and are free of your family’s randomly deposited possessions (aka clutter)! Also keep extras there of key items you might forget (glasses, deodorant, toothbrush, medications, phone charger, pens etc.)

Julia’s favourite office work space!

Finally, with 2020 off to a viral start, my top hot tip for right now: what to do when the flu (or anything flu-like!) strikes. Illness is a real concern if you have young children or if you are caring for anyone immune-compromised (which can often be the case with elderly parents). If students are sick, I ask them to video-chat or phone me instead of coming to my office.

I also have an advance plan for last minute emergencies. Such a plan might include the following:

• Knowing who you can call if you need a last-minute replacement;
• Having a backup lecture you could give in your sleep and sub-in if necessary;
• Creating a reserve, self-directed online module to assign if you need to cancel a class. This could be one that you could sub into any course. (A good example is the assignment I discussed in my previous post, which asks students to design the cell phone of a character in the play they are currently reading.)
• Work on what moves you. Take a pass on the rest. (Thanks for this reminder Melissa Poll!)
• When possible and reasonable, be flexible with students – so they will also be flexible with you.

Now I’m off to let the dogs out, get the after-school snacks ready, check-in by phone on my mom, and then return to a little marking – all while wearing my physio-prescribed leg band to improve my core-strength so my feet hurt less!

Whether you are an instructor who is considering becoming a parent, are in the thick of parenting, have emerged on the other side, or simply want to understand the parent-academic better, I’d be happy to hear your comments, questions, and advice!

If you don’t have children but find some of this advice useful, let me know too. Let’s work together to find ways to improve and refine our teaching while still maintaining our personal health and well-being.

Thanks for reading!

J