Scrambling to finish a surreal semester
It’s mid-May, the first hummingbird has appeared at my window feeder, and I’m submitting the final grades in my journalism classes at Central Connecticut State University.
It’s the last week of my first year at Central and the last week of a surreal semester upended by a pandemic that sent us scrambling to teach journalism online.
I keep thinking back to March 12, when I was heading to class and a student told me
“we all have to leave now.” The campus was closing immediately because a student may have been exposed to someone with COVID-19.
I raced to my office and grabbed my laptop, charger, lunchbox and papers that needed grading, and unplugged my fridge. My colleague, Prof. Steve Yavner, predicted we wouldn’t be back.
He was right.
We’d had a staff meeting the day before on how to teach journalism — a profession in which it’s essential to observe events for yourself — if it wasn’t safe for our students to do exactly that.
The day I left, I canceled an assignment that required students to cover a court case. Then I canceled a tour of a blighted neighborhood in New Britain with the head city sanitarian. Instead, a sanitarian and alderman would visit class by WebEx. It would have to do.
Since I teach news writing, I had it easier than my colleagues who teach multimedia and broadcast journalism. For one class, I dropped a multimedia assignment. For another, I had the students make data charts instead of videos. I urged them to stay home and stay safe. I now realize I came on too strong our first week online, giving midterms in all of my classes. I should have been more sensitive that my students were shell-shocked.
I even gave an assignment called “Sudden Death,” an unwise name in a pandemic. Students had a couple of hours to interview three people and write a news story on deadline. I gave them an easy topic: the COVID-19 disruption of people’s lives. They all came through.
Every class started with me saying, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” as I fumbled with a new headset and moved closer to the wifi signal in my house. If they were amused, the students hid it well. The day the alderman was calling into class, a windstorm knocked out my wifi and my electricity. I scrambled to cancel class and then drove to my sister’s house to teach my next class.
The students remained polite. It probably helped that I’d had a third of the 60 students in class last fall. They were used to my quirks, which I’m sure were magnified as I taught in a corner in my dining room.
I found it quite moving to see my students in unfamiliar territory. Many of them were taking classes in their childhood bedrooms, where the walls were still decorated with posters of their sports heroes. We got to meet their pets, spotted their siblings in the background, and one mom had her 4-year-old son playing at her feet during class.
As an empty-nester working in a quiet house, I relished connecting with the students. Some of them seemed to feel the same way, as they were missing their campus and their friends.
The semester was far from perfect. I kept moving deadlines around, and students needed extensions on assignments as they faced job losses and other crises.
One student, a certified nursing aide, became ill with COVID-19, and another took care of both of her parents when they contracted the virus. They’ve all recovered, and neither student missed a single assignment.
A few students stopped coming to class and responding to my urgent emails about declining grades, only to materialize for the final exam.
Life intervened, and I’m sure my insistence on proper spelling and grammar paled in importance. Saying good-bye this semester, not knowing if we’ll be back in person in the fall, was harder than usual. I got misty-eyed when one student wrote in our chat box, “I’ll miss you.”
Kate Farrish is an assistant professor of journalism at Central Connecticut State University and a former Hartford Courant reporter and city editor.