Common purpose

Classes were cancelled today so, for a second day, I stayed home. Plenty to do anyway, much of it getting a handle on the logistical challenges ahead: even if we are able to reconvene on campus in a month, not all of our students - especially international students - will return. In the meantime, we're realizing that online classes are not equally accessible to all. Some students won't have WiFi back home, others won't have a "room of their own" for participating, and, of course, some may be in time zones where our usual class meeting times fall in the middle of the night. Ensuring that all achieve the course goals will take a lot of work. Lucky for us, New School is giving us the week after Spring Break to work these things out; lots of other schools are demanding their faculties convert their classes with next to no notice at all. I was able to brainstorm these challenges over Zoom today; 70 of my faculty colleagues tuned into a Zoom conversation led by our dean, an experience of common purpose I confess I haven't had in a long time!

Our apartment's a nice enough place to work from remotely but by the end of working hours I started to feel a little cabin fever. One doesn't want to overreact, doesn't want to isolate oneself too completely from the world... and the rainy weather of the morning had made way for a nearly cloudless sky, scrubbed clean by a brisk wind. Spring, it seemed, was in the air! So we went out to one of our nearby parks (how lucky we are to have parks nearby) as the sun was wending its way toward the western horizon, where this burst of crocuses (croci?) awaited, its own celebration of the joys of common purpose. We'll get through this.