A nurse got infected at UCMC:
@JBStillFlying - I am well aware and not pleased by the provost’s recent announcement of the change to the academic calendar beginning Fall 2021 to shorten each quarter from 10 weeks of instruction to nine, purportedly in the name of "relieving stress " caused by the quarter system. Talk about bullpucky. Unfortunately the backlash that should have come following that announcement was squelched by the virus situation which escalated immediately thereafter. I certainly hope that the administration does not falsely believe that the student body is happy about the changes they have announced just because the students have been too overwhelmed with the current crisis to protest that decision.
@JBStillFlying My best wishes to you and your family - here’s hoping to nothing more than two weeks of home confinement
This is misinformed in not a few ways. Much has already been written on CC about the new calendar, number of instruction days and course load, so no need to repeat here. Anyone can look up that reasonably comprehensive discussion. There is also the report itself. Both sources will provide a lot more detail than what’s posted above. The TL/DR: Classes of '22 and '23 will be minimally affected, if that, and most will discover that it adds flexibility to their schedules in the last year or two. Classes of '24 and onward will be spreading their course load more evenly over the four years.
Talk of a “backlash that should have come” sounds like wish-casting. The announcement has been polarizing, to be sure, which is in keeping with the tradition at UC. Change creates lots of discussion and debate at that place. So nothing new there. Many are glad to finish by June; many others are stressed about taking four courses in nine weeks (newsflash: they can take three instead 
). So there’s been a ton of discussion and debate to begin with. But, once finals week converted to optional, online, M/C and/or cancelled exams - and then was extended another week - any student who wished to return to discussing, debating and even protesting the new calendar would have had the time to do so. Or they could have watched movies with their house. They could even have done both 
The students had MORE time to cover this issue last quarter - not less.
Whether some PARENTS are feeling overwhelmed or stressed about the academic calendar and the quarter system is another matter.
Seems like the University should charge whatever they currently charge for online classes. I have no idea if there is a difference but for most colleges there is.
Other colleges may charge differently for online because those courses don’t provide credit or don’t allow access to the same resources that students on campus would get (academic or career advising, etc). My older D attends a college with a significant inventory of online courses that you can take on-campus or in your parents’ home or wherever you happen to be that moment, but they are priced the same as in-person classes because you pretty much get the same content and the same resources. The online option is to increase flexibility for students, not to offer a less expensive version of the degree.
Does UChicago actually have an online option for classes where you earn credit? I wonder what platform they use? They are experimenting with flipped formats but those courses aren’t priced differently.
My impression from seeing how some instructors (university and otherwise) are working with Zoom elsewhere is that they are attempting to replicate an in-person experience as much as possible. My youngest is doing her sports training and music lesson via Zoom now. It’s not perfect but it seems to be working reasonably well.
I was a skeptic of Zoom and online classes until my youngest started his high school lessons on it last week. It has worked exceptionally well for him. So much so, that he now prefers it to actually going to school! It is live, and the students are able to interact, ask questions, etc. I do worry, however, for the international students that did find their way home, and now may have to do their classes on Zoom live in a different time zone.
@lilchaz - my son sent a text to us on Monday of finals week that lauded his Sosc III prof for having the adjusted class syllabus up on Canvas already. Here are the details, which include how to accommodate those students in a different time zone:
Class will continue to be held as originally planned;
Class will be arranged around video calls wherein one student will do a presentation on the reading for 5-10 mins, and then another student will respond to the presentation, and all followed by a general discussion;
Each student will do two presentations and two responses over the quarter. Each student will also take minutes on one class discussion to post to Canvas;
The rest of the grade is one paper and one final exam (answering several writing prompts) both towards the end of the quarter;
Students not able to join live classes because of time zone can watch recordings of the classes and respond with Canvas posts and do pre-recordings for presentations/responses.
My son’s takeaway: “This seems like a really good way to run the class.” Just one example but hopefully representative.
My guess is that many internationals will choose to participate live and just change their sleep schedules to make that happen. But it’s nice to see that the professor has allowed them another way to participate. Also, I’m pretty sure that instructors have been utilizing Canvas regularly as a discussion and communication tool so that part is completely unchanged.
There are 50 cases right now at UCMC.
The Law School somewhat controversial decision to keep letter grade for spring quarter.
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/3/29/law-school-plans-stick-status-quo-grading-bucking/
Lab Schools has already switched over to mandatory Pass/Fail.
'One student in favor of relaxing grading requirements for spring term, who asked not to be named, said she thought administrators had already mismanaged the crisis by choosing to hold exams in winter quarter, between March 10 and March 14. Administrators announced on March 10 that large gatherings would be suspended, exempting classes. The University then announced on March 12 that spring quarter would be remote, and urged undergraduate students to move out of housing by the end of winter quarter.
“People who had in-person exams, including all 1Ls, had to skirt CDC guidelines to go to the law school and take in-person exams that will be graded on the law school’s traditional curve. Think 100 people crowding in a classroom to take a bankruptcy exam,” she said, adding: “coughs were audible.” ’
The university did NOT “skirt CDC guidelines.” Exams aren’t “mass gatherings”, the school was more than a week away from Chicago’s mandated lock-down, and unless they sat everyone in a way that allowed students to look at their neighbor’s paper (not likely), everyone should already have been a reasonable distance from others as a matter of standard procedure.
The article fails to mention a key reason behind the decision: unlike most other top law schools experiencing a major disruption to their semester curriculum, Chicago’s quarter system enabled the school to complete one marking period and start a new one after a two-week break (which is the length of break that Law experiences this time of year anyway). Disruptions to the current curriculum will be minimal compared to other places.
I have a friend with a 1L at Chicago and apparently they will be zooming in federal judges and other prominent alums to supplement the online portion of the class. That doesn’t usually happen. So there are unique opportunities in addition to adversity this coming quarter.
While it’s not at all surprising to find some division over the “status quo” announcement, the reports of de facto threats (“we know who you are”) are most unfortunate. Not a very intelligent way to make your case - and good luck trying that as an “attorney-at-law” in the real world.
A lighter story on campus after the lock down:
Column: The pandemic, a professor and a duck named Honey: A story of life in a time of death
Honey returned to the Botany Pond at the University of Chicago in the first week of March, shortly before the coronavirus pandemic chased almost everyone off campus.
From his lab in a 19th century building overlooking the water, Jerry Coyne could see her, a female mallard with unique black mottling on her orange bill, and he was elated. This would be his fourth year of feeding and nurturing Honey as she nested and gave birth, a task that kindled a feeling in him that he calls “maternal.”
But almost as soon as Honey came back, a rumor spread: To guard against the new coronavirus, everyone but essential researchers would be sent home. Coyne, professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology & Evolution, was unlikely to qualify. What if he lost access to the pond? To Honey?
“I started feeling very anxious,” Coyne says. “I decided, I gotta go to the top.”
That night, in bed with his laptop, he wrote a letter to the university’s president and provost. With apologies for bothering them with a trivial request in the midst of a crisis, he typed:
“What I would like to ask is whether, if the campus closes and I am not considered an essential research worker, I would still be allowed to visit the pond at least twice a day to feed the ducks. This is a solitary activity and nobody helps me, nor would I stand near anybody else.”
A few plaintive sentences later, he pushed “Send.”
“I couldn’t sleep that night,” he says, “I was so worried they would say no.”
The Botany Pond is a small body of water nestled at the foot of two neo-Gothic buildings, a quiet spot set off the sidewalk, shady in spring and summer once the trees are in leaf and bloom. It has attracted migratory ducks for more than a century. It has attracted Honey since at least 2017, which was when Coyne noticed her and her four babies from his window.
“Why don’t I feed them?” he thought, and so he bought some high-grade duck chow, and took it down to the pond a couple of times a day.
Over the next few weeks, Honey became so tame she’d eat out of his hand and answer his special whistle. He made sure her babies were protected from predators. He thrilled to watch them grow into teenagers — “scruffy and ugly” — and learn to fly.
“I swore that no duck would die,” he says, “and none of them did.”
When breeding season was over that year, Honey and her kids disappeared to who knew where. Coyne guesses they hit the Mississippi Flyway, the bird migration route that extends from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, and he figured he’d never see Honey — named for her color — again. She might get shot by hunters or die of old age and, really, it was too much to hope that she’d find her way back to a little pond in Chicago.
But the next year, as miraculous and reliable as spring itself, Honey returned. Coyne was sure it was her because of her distinct bill, which he has photographed extensively, and because she heeded his whistle.
Once again, he fed her and watched out for her as she nested on a high window ledge. When her eggs hatched he helped care for her ducklings, tiny creatures that seemed to him as light as potato chips.
That year, two of the ducklings died — one in his hands — but eight made it. And once again, when they were strong enough, they disappeared into the sky. And once again, the following spring, Honey came back.
“It was like seeing an old friend again — or rather, a family member — who has gone on a long and perilous journey,” he says.
At the pond, Coyne became a minor celebrity, the eager and talkative guy who explained ducks to passing school kids and handed them good duck chow so they could feed the ducks something better than Cheetos and Doritos. Taking care of the ducks, in his view, was a community affair.
That’s the case he made a few days ago in his late-night letter to the president and provost.
“There is an old Jewish saying that goes, ‘If you have saved one life it is as if you saved the world,” he wrote. “Some of my colleagues say, ‘Well, they’re just ducks,’ but their lives are important to themselves, to me, and, I think, to our University community.”
After a fitful night’s sleep, he woke up to a reply from President Robert Zimmer:
“I fully sympathize with the view that they are not ‘just ducks’. Please take care of them, ‘our ducks’, as you have been. We are appreciative of this.
Stay well, and with best wishes,
Bob”
So three times a day during this pandemic, Coyne goes to the pond to feed the ducks. As it turns out, the campus, though quiet, isn’t fully locked down. People wander by occasionally to look at Honey, who is there this year with a male escort and another mallard — Coyne calls her Dorothy — who may be Honey’s daughter.
Coyne keeps his distance from the other duck-watchers. At 70, he is, in his words, “officially old” and officially at high risk from the virus, but he worries more about going to the grocery store than to the pond.
Yes, he knows ducks are not people. But he also knows that people and ducks are more connected, and more alike, than it may seem, and that in a time of fear and death, it’s important to do whatever we can, each in our own way, to help and celebrate life.
Thank you @marlowe1 for the heads up on this story.
Vlog from our favorite blogger CeCe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZEptvWqU8g
I feel bad for her and other 4th years that their final quarter ends so abruptly and they are highly unlikely to have a commencement to crown their undergrad years at U of C.
85 - I enjoyed those postings. I feel bad for CeCe and her classmates. I always admired her directness, self awareness, and intelligence. I’m sure it’s very hard for her right now.
I hope the class comes back next year during alumnae weekend to have the get-together that they will likely be denied this spring. It’s a total bummer that they are off campus now and physically separated from their houses and classmates, even despite the unprecedented communication technologies available today.
Somewhat to my surprise is that UChicago College sent out this tweet around an hour ago:
https://college.uchicago.edu/student-life/class-day
I hope as much as anyone in the world for COVID-19 to end and everyone’s life to be back to normal ASAP. But I know better to expect a normal commencement with literally thousands of people congregating around the Main Quad on June 12th. Maybe the University Administration is planning on a virtual commencement with a virtual Class Day?
^ Wondering if it was a mistake because some of the dates aren’t even correct. Is there such as thing as an “auto-tweet” that didn’t get cancelled/modified before being sent out?
From the “Spring 2020” FAQ page:
"The College is currently working to launch virtual programming for Spring Quarter and will share more information in the coming weeks.
Convocation: We expect to be able to provide an update on June Convocation events no later than April 15. Visit convocation.uchicago.edu for more information."
https://college.uchicago.edu/spring2020
Here’s the convocation page:
https://convocation.uchicago.edu/
re: post #112, I liked Cece’s laptop sticker at 9:45 of her video. The Reg is called ‘Brutal’ (ist). So cute.
^ Where do they find those? Bookstore?
A couple of Maroon articles on spring quarter and remote learning:
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/3/30/ahead-likely-amendment-pass-fail-grading-policy-uc/
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/4/2/university-offers-zoom-canvas-training-sessions-fa/