Sphinx

This time of year is usually the calm before the storm; the brief pause, full of anticipation and nervousness, between the end of the summer and the start of the new term, when it’s impossible to settle down to any proper research and one falls back into the fond belief – which does occasionally come true – that it’ll be fine once everything settles down into a routine. This year? It’s not the calm before the storm, it’s the frantic rushing around before the flood. The water is clearly, inexorably rising, though we don’t yet know how bad it will be. What to do? Try to shore up defences? Secure valuables? Move livestock and children to higher ground? Try to improvise a boat? Assume the worst or hope for the best?

As I’ve suggested previously, the main driven of this frenetic activity is the wish to exert some sort of control, to find some solid ground on which to build. A major part of the problem, to run with the flood metaphor, is guessing what approach will be most effective in getting us all through unscathed. Trust in the exciting new technology we’re promised will save us, even if it’s all untried and some of it isn’t actually ready yet? Or retreat to old certainties (tradition teaching techniques and rely on my command of the subject matter), strategically abandoning higher ambitions until the new landscape becomes clearer? The major difference from previous years is that we know we will have to build new structures and routines from scratch, adapting ourselves and our teaching to circumstances that we cannot yet see, rather than being able to settle into familiar patterns once the first few weeks are out of the way.

What if one of our students, metaphorically speaking, can’t swim? What’s the best response – swimming lessons, or build them a life raft? The former is clearly better in the longer term but they might drown in the interim, the latter uses resources that might be deployed elsewhere, to help a larger number… (Yes, I am still feeling cross about how much effort I’m having to put in to reconciling a blanket requirement to provide captions on all recorded material with the inadequacy of the programmes available to support this with the possibility that some students may have real difficulty in accessing big video files).

It’s difficult not to start falling into military metaphors and aphorisms at the moment: most obviously, ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy’. I know that I’m going to have to develop new work-arounds and techniques to deal with unexpected situations, however much I try to anticipate everything (and engage critically with the university’s slightly different approach to trying to anticipate things according to a different set of priorities), so it’s pointless working myself into a state about it before term has even started. Unknown unknowns, and all that. I fear our own mistakes more than I fear the enemy…

But on the whole I think this is an unhelpful way of thinking, above all because it misrepresents the situation. Students are not the enemy; the current threat is an impersonal force of nature (which doesn’t preclude the actions of individuals making it worse, of course). Students are potential victims of this as much as we are – but more than that, they are potential allies and resources, rather than children or livestock who just need to be rescued.

So, while in one sense the return of students to campus and the restart of activities is the flood that threatens to overwhelm us and will certainly dominate life for the next couple of months, I’m concentrating on seeing it instead as the arrival of people with whom I can work for collective survival. Just as teaching is not – and should never be – a matter of me imparting great wisdom from on high which they simply write down, but a process of mutual discussion, debate and enquiry, so teaching in the age of COVID is not a matter of me trying to protect them from every possible threat and adjust what I do according to their whims, but rather us working together to keep each other safe and healthy (mentally as much as physically) and to develop new ways of pursuing the old goals of understanding and enlightenment. They are going to help me learn; we are going to support one another, and hold back the rising waters…