Since the College moved to distant learning, a plethora of challenges have been faced by students, faculty, and staff. I spoke over Google Meet with Professor Purba Mukerji, the Chair of the Economics Department, who teaches a 200-level course titled “Economics of Multilateral Organizations” this semester, to explain the impact of new circumstances facing her department and the new pressures facing professors.
Pre-registration period for Fall 2020 semester classes took place earlier than usual this year. While she was given warning about the new registration date by the College administration, Professor Mukerji stated that “having that earlier rather than later was mind-blowing.”
She elaborated,“It was just so difficult to handle. Because even if you are on schedule, this kind of thing throws you off. And now you’re not even on schedule and you’re trying to do something sooner than you otherwise would have done.”
Additional pressures were added to the pre-registration process while the Economics department underwent a double-hire process. “We were scrambling to add these courses in Economics … The Financial Institutions and Markets course is very popular and we were trying to find the teacher for it. Because we had to do it in a hurry, it was scrambling at the last minute,” Professor Mukerji explained.
Moreover, there are “all of these things that have suddenly come up that need to be handled at the level of the chair of the department,” Professor Mukerji stated. That includes filling out Course Exception Forms that students would typically do on their own, and interacting with students in about seven to ten emails to attain precise information. Furthermore, faculty adding courses are added by the chair.
The Economics department has continued to hold regular departmental meetings, including “more informal meetings to discuss experiences about remote teaching.” That includes a way to “exchange ideas about what people have read on remote teaching and learning, and brainstorm about what has worked and what has not, and generally how life has been with this.”
Professor Mukerji has continued close communication with the department’s academic assistants. She explained that she has met with them almost every day. “If you get too far away and you don’t communicate, your productivity level goes down,” and that can be being so remote it affects individuals at an emotional level, Professor Mukerji asserted. “I know it’s overkill, but it really helps me out.”
Professor Mukerji has a young daughter of her own, a 4th grade student, which has added additional pressures to her teaching. “All we’ve been given is a bunch of, you know, links, where you try to go in and try to find problems for your kid. Suddenly you’re asked to be a full-time homeschool parent. Which is a huge job,” Professor Mukerji stated. “It is a huge burden … my husband and I are both teachers so my husband is doing virtual classes and all of that, as well.”
Professor Mukerji also explained that as an academic, having a routine of conducting research early in the morning before teaching classes, and even before her daughter wakes up, has left her research largely unaffected.
That being said, she has made an effort to keep her course moving in the same direction it had been prior to Spring Break. While it has required “completely new lesson planning,” Professor Mukerji has adopted technology such as a Blackboard device to be able to write as she would on the blackboard in a classroom and meeting at the scheduled time, twice a week, on Google Hangouts Meet.
“There’s something about the energy of the classroom. You know exactly who you are losing, maybe you can ask them a question… here, it’s just me with this device,” Professor Mukerji said. In order to keep the connection as efficient as it possibly can be, students mute their video and audio unless they are asking a question or presenting.
“It’s wonderful for me to see those faces when people turn on their videos… we see each other. That makes such a big difference in my heart. There are all these kids and they are all with me,” Professor Mukerji noted.
“For students, this is not what you signed up for,” she added. That being said, it is abundantly clear that not all students have direct access to remote learning. Professor Mukerji asked: “When technology becomes an issue, the whole thing is up in the air. How do you handle that?” Even further, “What is the solution? What is the way forward? That is a conversation that the College and the faculty need to have,” Professor Mukerji suggested.
And how is she assessing her students? “Within the same class, you’re going to have different ways of judging or grading people. If the technology is not working for someone at all, then in a sense, all they did [for the class] was up to the Spring Break,” Professor Mukerji said. With that, it “raises these kinds of basic questions in terms of equity — not just in terms supporting those that need the help, but then, is it alright to have different ways of judging how you did in class? And I think that in this case, one will have to be creative and try to balance. Maybe you’ll have different assignments. I haven’t worked through all of that yet. And I’m actually hoping that the technology issues work out,” Professor Mukerji concluded.
