Second day begins

 "Day 2! Give it up for Day 2!"

I drove in to campus today past the big testing event they are doing - a drive up swabbing. I hope this is not the ONLY one they are doing this fall; it seems kind of early (though maybe for students, or for faculty who traveled, and are concerned - I have an international student (from Australia) who said they were both going in for testing today AND were going to quarantine (and so: zoom to class) for 14 days just to be careful. I am glad they are; I am glad they are thinking of their classmates in this. Hopefully their test comes back negative.)

I'm not doing it. For one thing: I know I've not been exposed at this point so there's no reason to; better to leave that open slot for someone who needs it. And also - it is a swab test, and I don't know if it's the kinda-intrusive one or the really-intrusive one, and I just would rather not.

I'm getting a bit more comfortable with the routine. Oh, I would be happier than anything if tomorrow it were suddenly and miraculously safe to go back to the way things were done before but I don't see that happening. 

I hope because we're small, and a lot of our students are non-traditional, we'll escape some of the issues that University of North Carolina had - they had to close down again in the first week because of an outbreak. Blamed on partiers, but who knows - you bring together people from *everywhere* and don't do quarantining or at least testing up front, you're gonna get a disease brought in. (I can totally see how a small residential school could make this work - it would require students and probably faculty signing a pact to strictly limit off-campus interactions, but, if you had a student body you know didn't have COVID circulating in, you could do on-campus movie nights and dance parties and things and it could work. Of course on most campuses there wouldn't be alcohol (liability and drinking-age issues) so a lot of people would hate that idea, but...you could try to have at least something fun for the students)

At this point I don't even know. I am HOPING my mask in class, and the fact that I am at least 6' from people pretty much the whole time will protect me, but the idea of "aerosol transmission" and the blame levied on recirculated air in buildings has me slightly spooked. I wish we had better data on that than one paper from what happened in a restaurant in Hong Kong....though maybe the fact that we don't have a lot of evidence is good news, though "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." I don't know. 

Getting accustomed to the idea of by-Zoom office hours from home. I kind of faffed yesterday during mine but maybe during today's one hour, I try to get some reading done - I didn't quite make the "10 continuing-ed books by the end of teaching-summer" but if I stretch "summer" out to the start of fall (21 September), I could maybe still claim my "prize" (self offered and will be self-paid-for, but whatever). Also a colleague told me continuing ed reading totally does count towards scholarly productivity. I don't know. (In ITFF we have a saying - and forgive me, gentlemen, it is a stereotype and i know that, but: "What would a mediocre white man do?" because there is a subset of people - often male and white, though not exclusively - who are happy to claim even the tiniest of accomplishments as Big Things, and a lot of us (and this may be women in particular, in our culture) are socialized to downplay the things we do. Though then again: I think of when my dad was given a certificate of merit or whatever for all the service he had done for the church he belonged to, and his response was "I don't understand this, I was only doing what everyone *should* do." And of course the problem is: everyone should do it, but only a few people do, and that's why they're seen as outstanding. (And are often overburdened))