Tuesday afternoon things

* My brother had to go and pick up....a pump? I guess it was....from his mother in law's old house near Indianapolis. (My sister-in-law, who has been going in to work one day a week, and my niece, stayed home - I think they are somewhat distancing a bit just in case my sister in law gets infected at work). So he swung by Illinois to see my mom.

(The pump is being donated to friends of theirs who need it)

He set her up with a new iPad and an e-mail address, and we are going to try FaceTime tonight for a phone call. I am telling myself I am NOT NOT NOT allowed to tear up upon seeing my mom (even virtually) for the first time in six months, but if I need to, I can cry after hanging up.

Though if this works? And if I deem it "not really safe" to travel at Thanksgiving? Maybe we can at least do part of Thanksgiving by FaceTime and that would be a little less bitter.

Also, I am going to offer to help (over the phone) her figure out how to access her church's webpage - so she will be able to watch the Sunday services, which I think will be a nice thing. Not sure how much else I will push because I don't know how friendly iPads are for internet stuff, but this might mean she would be able to order stuff online - and if there's a second spike, and it gets really bad, she might be able to order groceries from Schnuck's - they deliver, but require online ordering. (At the beginning of this, I offered to do it remotely for her - have her on the phone telling me what she needed, and I would order it). But it looks like her state is doing better than mine, PROBABLY because there is better compliance with masking. (She tells me she has been out to the Jewel and everyone had masks - they require it - and there is one-way movement in the aisles, and she went to the meat market and everyone was in masks and being careful to distance).

But yeah. being able to see her face will be HUGE.

* I have two (of potentially 10-12 that I need) labs written for fall, with the idea of either "we can't be in each other's spaces or handling stuff that's shared" or even if we have to do a "holy crap abandon campus!" thing if cases show up on campus. I'm using some simulations programmed at Virtual Biology Lab, which is a free site (I hope it stays so). So far I have a lab based on the Chthamalus/Balanus (well, now it's Semibalanus, but whatever) barnacle-competition study, and another one involving a mark-and-recapture sampling simulator, and I'm....actually kind of proud of that second one, I will first have the students manipulate some of the aspects of the sampling (changing the number of traps, changing their spacing, changing how long the experiment runs) and then have them change aspects of the species (are they trap-shy, how large is the population, are they randomly, clumped, or uniformly distributed?)

And then, they move to "sandbox" mode, sort of: I am going to have them look at the estimates they got and assess "which aspect of the population  led to the default experimental settings gave the least-accurate estimates" and then ask them to think about "how can I change the set-up of sampling to try to get a better estimate" (without being allowed to 'cheat' and change the species). And then have them run that experiment.

It's a lot more complicated than what we normally do in class, and I think it's pedagogically better, actually, because it requires some thought towards experimental design and there's a lot of "if I change this thing, how does it change the accuracy of the population estimate or the variability between runs of the experiment?"

I will have to test it out - and if I can find a former student or colleague willing to give it a try, all the better. For one thing I need to time how long it takes to do it, though if we're doing these as off-campus labs (after we have to leave, or for students who are staying home), time is less of a factor. (Our labs are two hours long).

The other one is a little less involved but it's a similar idea: come up with hypotheses of what would happen if you change these things, then change them, collect the data, analyze it. I mean, it's not the SAME as going out into the world and doing the lab, but.....maybe it's OK?

There's also an island biogeography lab on there I want to play with and maybe write up an exercise on, and for natural selection I could either use one of the ones on there or rewrite my existing one (it is a simulation and especially if I provided printable "tokens" to represent the organisms it could work for someone to do it at home, alone)

And Cemetery Demography will still work, I just have to find links for the online data.

So that's what? Five labs? Ideally I need 12, 10 would be okay if not great.

If we could count on having the first few weeks at least in person, I could probably do some stuff outdoors on campus - outdoors is better than indoors, and there are labs I could do where people could mostly spread out. I could do a tree demonstration lab, so that would be a sixth lab, and perhaps something I've been playing with in my mind about "distance from a walked-on path and number of different plant species in a lawn" because for that one, I wouldn't even be having to hang over them to help identify - it could just be a count without a real identification beyond me maybe giving some basics of the common species ahead of time. So that's up to seven.

If my class remains small - last I checked it was 10, and please God, it would be so much easier if it stayed that small - I could probably even do the soil invertebrates lab as normal, more or less, just have people space from each other and have everyone use their own microscope.

The big issue with this is the uncertainty - I don't know at this point if we will be on campus until Thanksgiving (which is the plan), or if we will be on campus for a few weeks and then have to leave, or if they will decide in July that it's not safe. (Cases are still increasing here, though it's not clear if that increase is being mostly driven by jails/meat packing plants/nursing homes, though we do have students who work in all those places....)

I'm also still contemplating the independent project but I have a few ideas for projects people could do if they don't have access to lab space; either some kind of "observations in your own back yard" (Like: I have been watching the pollinators on my Abelia as I sit at my desk, and if someone had a plant heavily visited by pollinators, they could observe and count and relatie it to temperature or wind or whatever.) and there are a few online things - like someone could do a more involved version of the cemetery demography study. And even off-the-wall things like "environmental effects on sourdough starter" where a person could try, I don't know, water with different pH levels or looking at different flour sources, or something like that.

This is taking a high level of creativity to do this kind of lateral thinking this thing requires.  There may be other online data sources people could tap into and do their own analysis of.

* Some discussion on Metafilter where someone posted some (older) Chronicle of Higher Ed pieces that basically asked "why not just cancel the semester" and they were at first acting as if the push was to cancel FALL semester at universities and.....well, miss me with those thinkpieces. There are a lot of knock-on effects of closing a campus for a semester. The most immediate - and most selfishly important to me - is there's no justification for paying faculty and staff salaries and benefits - so we are all thrown into unemployment and whatever passes for COBRA now and while I do have enough savings that I could probably withstand an idle semester, I admit it would also be really tempting to say "okay, i gave you my most productive 20 years of my life, and you're doing this to me, forget you" and trying to carve out a new career (or more likely? Falling into despair and moving back in with my mom)

If college campuses close for a full semester, many of them - mostly the smaller schools that don't have giant endowments - probably won't open again. And we'll wind up with an even more two-tiered system: the few elite schools for the very wealthy, very well-connected, or remarkably brilliant. And online education that is probably less well-run than faculty thoughtfully trying to teach what were in-person classes online for a short time.....

I will say the president of my university sent a cheery (I hope not false cheer) letter around about our finances being in a pretty good state, and that we will not be raising tuition or fees for this fall (and apparently no pay cuts for faculty, though I was bracing for that). I hope he's right. And I hope after this fall that maybe we can get things a bit back more towards normal.

Right now I have to concentrate, I think, on two things: prepping labs that could be done either with minimal equipment by students at home, or be done online, and also updating my Policy and Law class (oy, the changes) and maybe doing a little updating of Biostats (to incorporate more probability)

* And I am keeping out the books I read as I finish them, so I can photograph them at the end of the summer. I remember as a kid the library book-clubs, where you got stickers to paste in a folder, and you got a McDonald's coupon for some small thing (a small fries, a small-size soda) at "milestones." We mostly didn't use the coupons because there wasn't a McDonald's in my town and we never seemed to get over to the next town (Twinsburg? I think?) where there was one. But I admit, I liked the low-level reward for doing something I would probably have done anyway (yes, yes, grind your teeth about "participation trophies" but I think one of the flaws of this flawed world is that a lot of us do what we "ought" to do, without any kind of reward, and in some cases - well, the old "no good deed goes unpunished" is a proverb for a reason).

So I don't know. Maybe if I finish ten "continuing ed" type books this summer, I get to buy myself  a prize? So far I've finished three and am more than midway through a fourth....I've completed two "fun reading" books and am nearly done with a third, though with "fun reading" I tend to trade off three or four books and it takes me longer to finish any one.

Then again: now that I've discovered frozen Coke, maybe that would be a good, smaller "prize" for completing something? It's funny, I am not at all a fan of cola and never drink it, but one day I was out and about and saw a billboard for frozen Coke and was like "that looks really good" and I actually have the McDonald's app on my phone right now....because I can order stuff without having to hand over cash money to the person working there to get it. (Though to just get a coke, and not, like, fries or something too, seems a little much to do a credit-card transaction for).

* Though I think there is something to be said, in difficult times, for revisiting some of the Good Things of childhood - like "summer reading club" (even if it's just me doing it in my own house, and it's books about plant ecology or probability instead of about horses or space travel) and stickers (I still get the Mrs. Grossman's packs, and they have been a source of consolation in....all this...) and I'm not quite sure what else - going through a drive through for a soda or an ice cream, I guess.

I was never big on going to the pool - when I was small I was afraid of deep water, and after I hit puberty I got super self conscious of how I looked in a swimsuit. And I guess a lot of my summer pursuits as a kid were kind of solitary, or could be done alone - trying to catch frogs, for example - I did it with my friend Elizabeth but I guess a person could do it alone (not that I'm going to try now, not much of a point. But if I spotted a toad in my yard, I would sit and watch it).

And maybe small toys? My May (I presume it is) gachapon crate (FINALLY) came today, the company reassures me the doki doki crates are still on their way and should be here by the 29th. I know international shipping has been greatly slowed but....the April crate was sent on March 20, and three months is....well, it's something. I am reserving judgment; if the crates DO show up I'll re-up with them, at least for the doki doki crate (I might drop the gachapon one, even though those may be delivering more reliably in this, I probably should be cutting my frivolous spending....just in case). If they don't show by the August renewal date? Forget it, I'm done with them, even if they plead "slow international shipping"

I guess I have been very spoiled in the past; I think of the Ingalls girls and how their big Christmas present one year was a tin cup for each of them, so they didn't have to share, and a piece of candy made with white sugar rather than brown. But I don't know. I find making my own fun and my own happiness in this, largely disconnected from other people, has been hard, and the little disappointments seem to loom larger than they would otherwise.