Obligatory anniversary post

Since posts like this are everywhere this week, here's mine. 

One year today, everything changed utterly. March 12, 2020 is the last day I was in a classroom with students face to face. The next day — Friday, March 13 — I was supposed to have a three-hour afternoon class with editing students. A third of them indicated before noon that they would not be attending class because of the mysterious virus they were afraid to contract, so I shifted the class to a series of online posts, notes, and readings. And thus it would be for the remainder of academic year 2019/20 and thus it remains for academic year 2020/21.

The pandemic has destroyed my brain. I experience all the things people talk about: brain fog, lost memories from the early months of the pandemic (March–May), unrelenting depression. On an average day I have about 80 minutes of good brain time; but my average work day is still ten hours long. So a lot of what I do is either extremely slow and inefficient or of dubious quality. Not ideal for someone who does intellectual labour.

We still don't know what the fall will look like — how can we? The situation is so changeable. Right now I am slated to go back to working on campus by the end of August and may be teaching in person the week after Thanksgiving. But lots could happen between now and then, for good or for bad. The larger context of Alberta post-secondary institutions is grim, and many students cannot afford to continue their studies next year. 

Until then, trudge trudge / whee whee.