Attn interested higher ed folks: My institution--a SLAC, women's college, in South Bend, IN--has been doing face-to-face instruction for 3.5 days now. Here are some observations from teaching so far: 1) regarding students, they are even more overwhelmed than I expected.

How do I know? Students are already in tears. They are simply overwhelmed--even more advanced students who have been in the college community for years now.

I have also released an optional online personal "check-in" to my students to fill out this wk so I can express support and connect them to resources, etc. Already, almost every student has reported feeling "overwhelmed" "helpless" "out of control."

We are a small campus that gives tons of support to students, but of course they feel this way. They are acclimating to 5 radically different course structures (F2F, modified F2F, hybrid, and fully online) amid a radically different campus setting, a global pandemic, &

a nation reckoning with long-standing social injustice. Not to mention whatever is happening in their personal lives. I ended up spending way more time and energy communicating with students before our first class about course logistics because of this. Even so...

we spent much more time during our first F2F meeting going over said logistics again because they are simply juggling so many new rules and processes to keep track of. So teachers, do yourself and your students a favor and plan for this as best you can.

2) Some good news: I was super worried that masks would impinge on our ability to hear one another during classroom conversations. So far, this has not been so bad for our socially-distant classes of 14. I teach inside w/door and windows open for circulation, and it's been ok.

That said, we have a great disability services office that has given my hard-of-hearing students auto transcription software. It worked well for the first-day lecture; we'll see how it works when we turn to a more conversation-based structure moving forward.

3) Due to social distancing requirements & classroom sizes, my 3 courses of 25-28 students have become 6 hybrid courses of half that size. I'm essentially managing the logistics of 6 hybrid courses, & even as a very organized prof teaching courses I've done before...

this is an astonishing amount of work. It's what I need to do right now, and I'm thankful for a job that I love at an institution I love. But wow, we faculty need a serious break and some appreciation for all this. If you are faculty & still planning courses, do what you can to..

find ways to make things even a little easier on yourself this term, especially when the emotional support our students need will demand a lot from us--much more than usual, from what I'm already seeing.

I also find myself thinking about contingent faculty who regularly juggle course loads like this across multiple institutions all the time. I am reflecting on my responsibility to do more about this injustice.