Preparation time begins

Part of my distress last night (I am better, I guess, or at least, still here, this morning) is that I'm scared about what's coming on campus. I've never taught online except for one disastrous semester of a directed-readings class when I couldn't get people to discuss on the discussion board even under pain of them failing.

How am I going to do this?

Also, how are our students going to do this? Some of them live in areas without broadband or even cable modems, some of them are going to be in households with parents trying to work from home and younger siblings trying to do K-12 online. Some of them are parents themselves with kids to watch.

It's an incredible and awful disconnect to watch network television. The local news is containing chirpy advice about supporting our local restaurants (doing drive through or carry out) while simultaneously showing the virus creeping ever closer to my town.

And then they cut to a Target or Burlington Coat Factory ad, where happy families are out buying clothes for Easter celebrations, and there's lots of candy, and tables full of fancy food. And I admit, I raged at it on Saturday - how can they still SHOW that?

I mean, I hope it won't be that long that we'll be able to do that again, but I fear it will be. And I fear there won't be much left in the way of businesses other than maybe Wal-mart.


I hope we get some good guidance today but I also fear it's going to be me, sitting alone in my office, trying to figure out Zoom and the online testing system from online tutorials.

I'm also frankly afraid after this they will be "Okay, you all taught online this semester, so let's just go ALL ONLINE FOREVER!!!!" and then I will have to decide: do I teach a way I hate to teach, and be miserable, or do I quit and go out on the job-search with literally thousands of other people, many of whom would be more attractive candidates for jobs than I would be.

I'm also worried we're going to run out of food. And that it's going to get ugly, fast, after that.

This is not what I wanted for my fifties.

I'm trying to find a silver lining and failing; the hope I have centers on that this won't actually last eighteen months.

ETA: Yeah, in my distress last night I did reach out to a "crisis line." I was worried they'd be mad at me or dismiss me because I wasn't actively suicidal. It wasn't so much I wanted to die it was....I just would very much like to hibernate for the next however many months and wake back up when things are a little better. I don't know. I'm terrified of so many things. The biggest one being that there is literally nothing I can do that will stop this disaster that might be the end of the actual world, and I don't know how to cope with that, I don't know how to go in to work and set up discussion boards and try to narrate my lectures and act as this is somehow remotely "normal" and what I should be doing, when I don't know if I'll still have a job in six months, or if I won't be in a state of starvation by then.

I made a very long list this morning of what I need to try to do and am chipping away at the smallest things, but it is with a sense of deep, deep unease.

(I did get word back from CIDT that it's OK for me to be here, so at least I can feel like I'm not breaking any laws).

Good lord how I long for those times when I complained about how I was "boring" because all I ever did was work.