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A few weeks ago, I had to put down my cat of 14 years. She was very sick and there were no roads to recovery. Her name was Regan. I got her my first year of graduate school, when I had just started at the University of Virginia, and I was living in a basement apartment, in a not-so-safe part of town, on my own for the first time. I was in a doctoral program with a bunch of older, married men, and I was lonely. Regan was my first friend in Charlottesville. If you’ve ever had a pet die—or had to make the decision to end their life—you’ll know the grief and guilt that I felt, feel still. We’re in the middle of a “triple” pandemic, which I’ve watched killing hundreds of thousands of people and disproportionately affecting those who are already most vulnerable, and I’m also sad about my cat. On its own, Covid-19 is causing all sorts of problems—and not just sickness and death. People are suffering from mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression; job loss; homelessness and food scarcity; domestic violence; racial discrimination; you name it. But it’s not just that. We’re also all still experiencing whatever life would normally be throwing at us. Come fall, students will still be stressing out about projects and exams, still wanting to rush, still eating leftover pizza, still hooking up, still doing research, still missing their parents, still working out, still cracking jokes, still procrastinating, still singing in the shower, still praying, still volunteering, still playing ultimate Frisbee, still skipping class, still applying for jobs, still requesting accommodations, still sleeping in, still ending relationships, still feeling proud about their grades, still starting their own businesses, still asking for recommendation letters, still fighting with friends, still protesting, still driving with the windows down, still getting accepted into grad school, still cheating, still feeling like they don’t belong, still reading the news, still trying to earn money, still drinking, still shaving—still living, that is. And my life continues too. I’m still a mom. I still want to write and do research. I still want to support and uplift my colleagues. I’ve still got to create an online course for the fall. I have books to read, a stack of New Yorkers to finish. (One of my favorite bits on the show The Good Place is a conception of hell as “nothing but a growing stack of New Yorker magazines that will never be read.” I laughed a little too hard at this joke.) Dishes need to be washed, laundry needs to be folded, rent needs to be paid. My house could use a good dusting. I found out yesterday that I can go up early for promotion; there are a lot of forms to fill out, y’all! It’s my friend’s birthday today, I got the oil changed in my car this morning, and I have reservations at the local pool later on, if an afternoon thunderstorm doesn’t pass through. I wake up too early, I eat heirloom tomatoes with a shake of salt, and I don’t always put enough sunscreen on. I’m grateful, I’m cranky, I’m hormonal, I’m excited, I’m overwhelmed, I’m angry, I’m weary, I’m . . . . This is life, my life. And it’s, inexplicably, somehow, still going, amidst everything else. There will be some big stories in the fall—the pandemic, the presidential election, the Black Lives Matter protests, the federal arrests that are starting to seem more like kidnappings—and we must attend to them. They are devastating, deep rooted. We must not look away—or allow our students to look away. We can teach to these big stories, we can support one another through them. But our students will not stop having everyday concerns, needs, questions, and experiences, those seemingly “small” stories. We must allow for them too. After all, they will affect, as they always have, how our students learn, how motivated they are, how much time and energy they can or want to give to any academic pursuits, how they interact with us and their peers. We must hold the mundane and the massive together, in tension. For years now, I’ve kept a note in my wallet that my aunt wrote for me, for one of my graduations, I think it was. It’s frayed and faded, a quotation by author Grace Paley. I pulled it out recently, when I was grappling with the loss of my long-time feline companion . . . and so much more: “Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don’t stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.” Life sure don’t stop. Not for us and not for our students. We must remember this, come fall. Thanks to Andreas Broscheid for offering important feedback to earlier drafts of this blog post.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvIfdwQV5dY[/embedyt] Hi friends. As I and others have reflected on in recent posts, our students have been experiencing not simply the typical challenges of online education, under the best of conditions: difficulty with time management, lack of motivation, glitchy or unavailable or prohibitively expensive technology; they’re also experiencing a lack of connection. My students liked being in class: they enjoyed sharing space with each other; they wanted the chance to interact with me. And it wasn’t just them; I really missed the in-person experience too. Today, I want to offer the concept of “self-disclosure” up for consideration, as one frame for thinking about closing such connection gaps, which have only been exacerbated by these times of distancing and isolation. There are lots of different definitions of this term, “self disclosure”; I personally like the one I found on YouTube from a Communication Studies instructor who said that “self-disclosure is the process of deliberately revealing significant information about oneself that would not be normally known by others.” To repeat, “self-disclosure is the process of deliberately revealing significant information about oneself that would not be normally known by others.” There are, I admit, risks to this kind of self-disclosure in the educational context, for instance, a loss of credibility in the eyes of some students, depending on the significant information shared; apparently, studies have shown that students don’t exactly appreciate hearing about their instructors’ drinking habits! Who would have guessed? But research has also found a lot of benefits too. Self-disclosure can signal the values of openness and humility, it can foster interest and motivation, it can increase the activity in a class, and it can even improve final course evaluations. But, for our current context, I want to focus on another one of its many benefits: that self-disclosure can humanize everyone involved in the learning process and can therefore help to create connections—connections that have been so compromised by the coronavirus. We can, as Rick Moody recently wrote in The New Yorker, “try to cause the humanness to shine through the ones and zeroes.” This revealing of information, on the parts of faculty and students alike, has already been occurring in various ways in our courses, even at the most “normal” of times, from what the syllabus communicates about us as instructors (i.e., our values, our personality, our pedagogy) to what we (think we) learn about individual students through disability accommodation requests that we may receive. In the past, I’ve certainly shared a variety of significant information about myself that my students would not have otherwise known: the time I took a trip, on my own, to India, between my junior and senior year of college; my positive experience with the meditation app Headspace; my great love, borderline obsession, with extra toasty Cheez-its (and yes, this does count as significant piece of information about me). It’s happening now too, online, when cats or kids pop up onto screens; when I wear my Colgate sweatshirt to teach synchronous sessions on Zoom rather than normal work attire; when students mention how bored and out of sorts they are. But such self-disclosure has always seemed a bit impulsive or haphazard. In these times of crisis, I’m suggesting we try to be more intentional about it. The literature on self-disclosure offers various recommendations for how to be effective, some of which seem beside the point to me right now, for instance, making sure to relate it to your course content or trying to vary the topics and timing. The recommendations I’m gravitating toward the most, right now, are the ones that say: be honest, be authentic, be vulnerable. If you’re struggling, let students know. If you’re worried, tell them. If you’re tired or stressed or overwhelmed or uncertain, don’t feel like you have to keep it to yourself under the guise and pressures of professionalism. We all know those standards are biased anyway. Be real. This can let students know they’re not alone. It can model how to handle ambiguity or difficulty. It can create connections, between actual human beings, which is precisely what we all need right now. Thank you.

As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, I was wrestling with how to teach a rather unpopular class on “just war theory.” For so many of my students, who have lived through unending conflicts, the reasons to go into battle are unclear. A good number of them reject the distinction between justifiable and unjustifiable wars; for them, all wars are unjust. Many believe that political grandstanding and neo-colonial campaigns have been the cause of military interventions, and that peaceful negotiations could have resolved international conflicts. In the classroom, with its dynamic back-and-forth of questions and answers, discussion of just war theory was engaging. Tension could be thick at times, and the lack of any clear resolution problematic for some, but that is the energy of active learning! The pivot to online asynchronous teaching and learning has made engagement more of a challenge. Yet the pandemic provides a context on which to build a rich discussion of this ancient concept. The “War” Against the Coronavirus Political and health leaders throughout the world have used the metaphor of “war” to describe the global village’s fight against the novel coronavirus. It seemed appropriate then to ask students to consider how the criteria of just war theory illuminate the reality in which we find ourselves. Jus in Bellum The architects of the just war theory imagined that both sides would engage in reasonable behavior and proposed standards for activity in war. For its part, the virus does not abide by any standards. This reality, however, should not preclude us from acting justly. To get at this, students examined two jus in bellum criteria: “distinction” and “proportionality.”   Distinction involves a clear focus on the enemy combatant. In this case, as students noted, all efforts should target the virus. The war on the novel coronavirus was not a time for playing politics among civic or religious leaders, or promoting personal or party agendas. Distinction obligates citizens to play their part and stay at home, wear protective personal equipment when necessary, and abide by social distancing rules. The principle of proportionality focuses on ensuring that combatants are respectful of the other side’s citizens and their property. No unwarranted destruction should accompany military action. Students observed that the virus violates this principle, but that should not preclude the human community’s commitment. Some questioned whether the economic shutdown, closing of nation-state borders, migration of schools to remote learning, and enforced lockdowns were evidence of a violation of this principle. These defensive measures have resulted in a rate of unemployment not seen since the Great Depression, disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations, particularly communities of color, the hoarding of an array of products, and increased incidences of mental health issues and domestic abuse, to name a few. I was struck that a handful of students also pointed to price gouging and rise in the number of scams associated with Covid-19. They saw these criminal actions as evidence of “internally” violating proportionality. Jus Post Bellum In their assessment of jus post bellum, students considered measures that would need to be implemented as we moved out of “shelter in place.” As I imagined, students’ responses were filled with frustration about how long they would have to be on lockdown in their homes. For graduating students, anxiety about their futures was palpable. According to jus post bellum, legitimate authorities must be the ones to set the conditions of peace. Students recognized the legitimate power of authority to safeguard its citizenry, but also realized the frustration of waiting. Out of abundant caution, political leadership had to exercise “just cause for the termination” of this campaign against the virus. As they see the number of infections decrease, a plan can be put in place to open gradually. “Proportionality” must also inform during this post-war period. While there exists impatience to learn the origins of this virus and whether persons bear responsibility, the dictates of just war theory hold that there can be no revenge. Efforts post-war should be concerned with reconstruction, remediation, and reparations. This aspect of jus post bello did not sit well with my exasperated and exhausted students. Answers and accountability were fine, I let them know, but retribution was not. In the past, most of my students would dismiss my teaching on just war theory as irrelevant. But, making a link to our present-day war on Covid-19 helped them understand and appreciate the theory.

Is the study of theology worth it? That’s a question you and I might pose to our students at the beginning of every semester. At times, we may have to answer this query for ourselves. At the beginning of each semester, I presume this is a question that students have, particularly because at my university students are required to take three theology courses. The first day of theology classes, then, I offer a value proposition. (Now, mind you, I generally teach moral theology classes primarily to business and pharmacy students.) I tell my students that this course may not position them for their ideal job in a corporation or biomedicine, but that a theology course can help students think, write, and speak with a depth and breadth they before had not known. The subsequent question every term is, “but how will that help me advance in my career?” These developed skills, I tell them, will aid them in living out the challenging and, perhaps, painful realities of life. That has never been truer than in these days of Covid-19. One of the first topics I teach is “narrative.” I invite my students to consider what the foundational stories for different religions are. Conversations extend from the metanarratives that undergird traditional monotheistic religions to Rastafarianism, Wicca, and Mormonism. These class days tend to be lively ones as we move into discussions of the Branch Davidians and the Westboro Baptist Church. Good narratives mature over time as profound experiences impact and challenge them. My parents’ generation had Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Second Vatican Council, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the rise of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Honestly, it made me jealous. I wanted stories to add to my collection, but could not imagine having any of such historical impact as they had. How young and naïve I was! GenXers and I have experienced stories that have forced us too to reevaluate the foundational narratives in which we were grounded. The students in front of me, now on my computer screen, were curious about my generation’s stories. Mind you, when I first started teaching, as I suspect all of us are/were, we are/were our students’ older sibling. Now, I could be their parents and for that reason, they are curious. When asked, I speak of how marginalized groups and their allies consistently have fought for equality, particularly LGBTQIA+ citizens, communities of color, and immigrants; seemingly endless wars in Viet Nam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq; governments, including the United States, having a wide range political scandals; 9/11; and, of course, the information technology revolution. For some reason or another, they are fascinated, and I suspect hungry like I was when I was younger to have their own stories. While some have alluded to the global digital transformation in their lives, there has never been a clear consensus as to what might unite GenZers in a common narrative. Now, there is. They get it. Students recognize that they must understand the profound effect this global health crisis has had on them, and on their narrative. For those who have been grounded in an understanding of who and what God is for them, they will have additional work that may take them places about they least expected to go. What will be required is what the study of theology provides:  some deep thinking, critical writing, and clarity in speaking.

I, like so many, have been flooded with a mixture of emotions during this pandemic and self-isolation. While feelings of fear and anxiety often overcome me, I also have a profound sense of gratitude. I am privileged to be able to take a step back and ask religious questions those deep questions of meaning and value–with fellow religious educators. It is from phone conversations in isolation that Dr. Kathleen O’Gorman and I came to wonder what is this emergent curriculum, or “curriculum of pandemic,” that has descended upon us all, teaching us? What might we learn and how we are we called to respond in meaningful, educative ways?  The first place Kathleen and I thought to process this emergent curriculum was with our learning community, to learn from this pandemic with our students and alums. We invited a small group of about 10 people, all of whom were enthusiastic about this gathering, into a process of introspection and learning. It was apparent from our initial correspondence leading up to and during our first session that we all want to feel connected in some way right now. This affirmed for me the need not just for community, but to create an intentional learning community. I­ –we– longed for a “community of conversation”–to connect and make meaning together. For me, the calling to teach means both teaching and learning and this pandemic called my colleague and I to be more intentional about our praxis as teachers and learners together. Kathleen coined the titled for our virtual sessions “Pandemic Pandemonium.” There is no script or textbook that tells us what we can learn and how we should respond to this global crisis; therefore, we developed a framework of four sessions from which will flow a process of unpacking this curriculum of pandemic. Drawing inspiration from Kathleen’s gifts of music and aesthetics, we framed each one around a different song to evoke our affective sensibilities. In our first session, we set the context for our process of teaching and learning through the pandemic by listening to Sam Cooke sing “A Change Is Gonna Come” set to a video with still images of people standing up for their human rights across the world throughout different moments in history. In sharing our interpretations and insights from this video and song, we discussed how we might connect these historical movements for change to the change emerging before us right now. What change do we want to see from this experience of sheltering in place, from teaching in learning through new modes and mediums, and from recognition the earth is healing itself while we remain still?  We concluded that first session by observing how each movement for change in society was a movement towards deeper inclusion. How, then, is this curriculum of pandemic guiding us towards greater inclusivity? This set the tone for our next session, “Go to your room” (something Mother Earth seems to be telling us right now), and the introspection on our feelings and emotions as we withdraw from everyday life. Following John Lennon’s song, “Isolation,” we invited our group to start thinking about how this time away has opened new patterns of living. How have our feelings given rise to new ways of thinking and experiencing the world and how might we help others (those we serve, family, friends) discern the meaning and value of isolation as we are experiencing it?  Our third session will reimagine how we “Come Together” (using the Beatles cover song by Gary Clark Jr.), by asking: What now? What is the meaning of all this?  What are we learning from gathering in new ways and how does that inform and transform our praxis as religious educators; how does this change in patterns of living call us to rethink our curriculum and praxis towards greater inclusivity? In our final session, we curated a curriculum of closure to be the start of a new beginning. With help from The Beatles again, “Let it Be,” we reflect the meaning of  Sabbath during this time as we ask what is Mother Earth telling us? How are we called by Mother Earth to Let it Be? We end our session with a pastoral plan informed by what we learned and how we are called to respond. I hope to return to these reflections as our process unfolds in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I am sharing this experience in developing a process curriculum to invite others, if you have not already begun to do so, to engage in a process of introspection and discernment with your learning community to uncover how your teaching and learning can respond to a curriculum of pandemic.

Being a professor during this pandemic has led me to several Wile E. Coyote moments. Looney Tunes character, Wile E. Coyote makes elaborate plans and employs complicated methods to achieve a singular goal—catching the Road Runner. One running gag involves the coyote falling from a high cliff; the coyote is so preoccupied catching the road runner that he runs off a cliff but doesn’t realize it for a moment. He then looks down, realizes that there is no ground beneath him, and falls. That moment that he looks down and sees that there is no ground under him is what I refer to as the Wile E. Coyote moment. He is so busy running and chasing that he does not realize that something fundamental has changed, and he can no longer run in the same way that he did before. Several times while teaching during this time of crisis, I felt like I was trying to run on  air, mostly because, I too, was chasing a singular goal—normalcy. With so much turned upside down, it is understandable that we would all want some things to remain unchanged. I realized, though, that the classroom, and the teaching life in general, was not the place I would find normalcy. At first, I focused on changing my physical classroom course to a virtual classroom, but I did not stop to rethink my course that had been online all semester long –-even though those students were also experiencing a major context change. That’s when I realized that I was trying to run on air. When I think ahead to my weeklong concentrated course, still envisioning it as a completely in-person class, I am setting myself up to run on air. When, as collective faculty, we are leery of changes to policy for fear of loosening any standards and worry about precedent that will be set, we are trying to run on air. Wanting a sense of normalcy is very different from pretending that things are normal, or that we can continue to do things the way we have and our new normal will adjust around old rules. Teaching in times of crisis means realizing that in times of crisis, the rules are different. And in prolonged crises, the rules must be made up as we go along. Old ways of thinking no longer serve us—they will leave us running on air. There was one time when the Coyote caught the Road Runner. But as he was chasing, he did not realize that the Road Runner had gotten much larger. This was no longer the Road Runner that he knew. Nevertheless, he pulled up to the Road Runner with his knife and fork, realized that it was too large to eat, turned to the viewers, and angrily held up a sign to the audience: “Okay, wise guys,--you always wanted me to catch him–now what do I do?” In this time of pandemic, our classrooms, schedules, and overall reality have changed—for us and our students. Approaching this time as though it is normal may just be too big for us to devour right now. There will be a new normal when this crisis is over, but we do not know yet what it will look like, or when it will begin.  So, maybe, we need to stop creating elaborate plans to catch the proverbial road runners professors pursue. We need to stop chasing the fear that our students’s education will be diminished if they don’t do all the things in the syllabus. Stop chasing our pre-pandemic publishing plan. Stop chasing all of New Year’s  teaching and professional goals we set only four months ago. Some of us may continue to run, but now in a new direction as we learn our new contexts and work with students on how our learnings help us to respond. Some of us may jog as we relax expectations of our students and ourselves. Some of us may slow to a walk as we journey with students trying to make sense of it all. And sometimes we will need to sit and give ourselves permission to let many of our pre-pandemic plans just, “beep beep,” on by. 

In the history of Christian thought, suffering has frequently been conceptualized as a process of “refinement.” Suffering “refined” believers and religious communities by (painfully) stripping away the unnecessary, as well as by revealing and perfecting the core dimensions of religious practice. I am writing this on the first day of the Spring Break—normally a time to slow down and reinvigorate oneself in the midst of a busy semester. However, this year it also comes in the midst of the global Covid-19 outbreak. In the state of Oregon, where I teach, the governor issued the stay-at-home order this morning. All universities in my state had temporarily shut down last week, and my institution is moving from face-to-face to fully online delivery. This is also the case with many universities across the country. Instead of refreshment, Spring Break has brought an accelerated work pace, deep concern for our families and communities, and a host of uncertainties about what lies ahead. As a teacher, alongside my colleagues, I am working to determine the best ways of adjusting our traditional face-to-face classes to alternative modes of delivery. As a theologian who studies the history of Christian theologies of suffering and healing, I cannot help but think of the Covid-19 crisis as a reality painfully refining our pedagogies, stripping away the obsolete and revealing and perfecting the essential dimensions. I am not suggesting that this global health disaster is somehow a positive force in the history of higher education (or humanity in general).  I mourn the lost lives and the health, economic, and social tolls of this pandemic, the full extent of which we are yet to experience. At the same time, I am convinced that, as self-reflective educators, we are called to think creatively, including about negative factors, and, without denying the harm, still imagine possibilities of a positive impact they might bring upon our practice of teaching. By, painfully, taking away our more conventional models of instruction, the current crisis might refine essential, but at times, neglected core dimensions of a vibrant pedagogy; one that includes innovation and creativity, meaningful connection with our students, and awareness and responsiveness to wider cultural questions. As Covid-19 forced classes to move online, it presented faculty with a novel challenge of adjusting all face-to-face courses for remote delivery. As I ponder the best practices of successfully conducting my undergraduate honors seminars over Zoom, these sustained deliberations yield new pedagogical insights and highlight some deficiencies of the ways I have taught this class in a traditional format. The Covid-19 challenge pushes us to exercise renewed pedagogical creativity with our courses, which we are being forced to re-examine, reform, and even re-invent afresh.  The recent days have brought a heightened awareness of many students’ daily sacrifices in pursuit of a college degree. I learned of some of my students’ lack of high-speed Internet access in their homes, of others’ inability to afford plane tickets, and yet others’ struggles with academic demands due to anxiety, intensified due to the outbreak. Covid-19 and the resulting academic adjustments have fostered a new, more meaningful, level of knowing my students, understanding their unique needs, and therefore being better able to teach, mentor, and support them.  In an academic era anxious about the relevance of the humanities, the daily disruptions of Covid-19 may present students with intellectual opportunities to develop their own responses to the crisis in relation to the humanies’ rich traditions of making meaning of and resisting suffering. As instructors, we might intentionally make space in our courses to integrate questions exploring such connections between the past and the present (expressed in world religions, literature, philosophy and art). After all, this profound and unsettling crisis might yield unexpected refinements of our students’ pursuits of knowledge and justice, akin to its refining of our own teaching craft. (This blog has previously appeared on the University of Chicago’s Craft of Teaching the Academic Study of Religion blog.)

Covid-19 is not the first crisis through which I’ve taught. The past year has been one of intense personal crisis for me, and I’ve had to keep teaching right through it. Now we’re all in personal crisis. Everyone is doing a new thing in higher education. No one was prepared for this, we’re all learning how to do it, and we’re not doing it in a vacuum. Many of us are suddenly in crisis; people we know and love may be out of jobs or ill with Covid-19, or suffering in some other way. I have learned an important thing in this past year: When in personal crisis and needing to keep teaching, I have to change my expectations of myself. When I am in crisis, I will not be everything I think I should be as a teacher. (Even when I’m not in crisis, I will not always be everything I think I should be as a teacher.) In crisis, though, I have to let go of those expectations and get realistic. I will not have energy to meet with every student about his or her paper drafts like I usually manage to do. I will not have energy to create an imaginative new assignment or even, perhaps, a new exam. I will not have energy to have lunch with students every week to get to know them better. My energy will be expended by caring for myself—making sure I eat properly, see supportive friends, and work through my own stuff. There will only be so much energy left after those basic things. I have to make energy choices. Am I caring for myself before my students? Yes. In the same way that airline attendants insist we put the oxygen masks on ourselves before we put them on our children. If I am taking care of myself, I am some good to my students. If I ignore myself in order to do the things I think I should be doing, I will be no good to my students because I will be exhausted inside of a month. Start by checking in with yourself. Reflect on where you are and what you need. What are you thinking and feeling? What do you need for your physical health? What do you need for your mental and emotional health? What structures will enable you to feel somewhat stable and keep moving? Who do you need to help you? Once you’ve established where you are and what you need in this moment (and these things may change day-to-day), take steps to put these things in place. Get yourself set. Then look at your syllabus. What are the 2-3 things you most want your students to get from class? What on your syllabus will accomplish those? What can you cut and still make sure students receive those things? If you’re reading this blog, you’re a good teacher. Because you are a good teacher, even if you cut some things, your students will still have a good experience and learn what you want them to learn. Readers of this blog are professors who care about our students. We want to do well by them, to teach and mentor for their lives. This means we probably have exceptionally high standards for our teaching. We are probably inclined to forge ahead trying to make this new learning environment work for our students or even to make sure they have what they need in their personal experience of the crisis. But if we forget to attend to ourselves, we’ll pass out from exhaustion before we have a chance to help our students.

What simple gestures and accommodations at the end of a semester can lighten the load without compromising teaching and learning? Educators expect waning energy as a semester and academic year conclude. Students are overwhelmed trying to finish overdue assignments, final projects, and exams. Faculty are at the breaking point with grading, administrative tasks, and work/life balance. While student energy for learning flags, most faculty tap into their very last teaching reserves to end courses in the best possible spirit. This normal rhythm of attenuating energy is intensifying in the Covid-19 crisis. End of year celebrations like graduation are not there to provide momentum, needed affirmation, and closure. Educators have become a last line of continuity and support for increasingly vulnerable students. We are teachers turned life-coach, counselor, parent, and pastor. All the while, grief and loss are mounting on every side. Here are four simple ways to lighten the teaching and learning load to finish well: Take a hard look at any remaining assignments left in the semester. Chances are, only one or two assignments are crucial assessment indicators for final grades. In one of my courses, it is a final exam. In another, it is an accumulative writing project. Other smaller-scale learning assignments that support student engagement and course tracking won’t impact an overall course grade to any significant degree. In the last few weeks of teaching, be transparent about which few assignments are crucial to finishing well in order to lighten the teaching and learning load. In one course, I’ve made other assignments optional or extra credit. In another, I’ve made select assignments pass/fail. Options and clarity help students make informed decisions about where they should focus their waning energy, and faculty can save significant time doing less low priority grading. Diversify ways an assignment can be submitted. In one of my courses, students are required to write a formal film review. I’ve offered them the alternative of submitting a slide presentation with audio narration. Or they can choose a creative project connecting a film’s themes to the challenges of Covid-19. Different choices allow students to meet assignment objectives with less fatigue and anxiety or less intensive editing help from remote support services. Including opportunities to connect with Covid-19 fosters learning engagement and helpful conversations in their life circles. Students reveal surprisingly diverse and creative communication skills when modes of presentation are flexible. And diverse submissions make the drudgery of grading … almost … fun. Allow students to partner with peers on assignments. In one of my courses, students were writing individual reviews on one of three books to complete the semester. Fifteen papers to write, fifteen papers to read and grade. I adjusted the assignment and asked students reading the same book to submit one review written collaboratively. They divided tasks and wrote with improved shared insight while bolstering their peer-to-peer relationships weakened by less classroom interaction. Overall, shared grades were higher, everyone benefited, and I graded 3 book reviews instead of 15. Most important: reassure, reassure, reassure. Students need a strong ongoing word of encouragement to finish well. Let them know expectations and goals are shifting and simplifying in response to Covid-19. I remind students at every possible moment that their singular task is to stay engaged in course learning to the degree they are able and maintain good communication about their circumstances and needs. In return, it is my responsibility to make sure they have every possible opportunity to finish their courses well. Reassurance means hosting conversations on Zoom or other discussion platforms about specific challenges or griefs impacting students’ lives. Reassurance means reminding them that, even in very uncertain times, they have value and gifts and a future. Reassurance means sharing our passion for our area of study and its resourcefulness during a pandemic. Reassure, reassure, reassure. It is less time intensive than grading, and it will help students reach the finish line with wellbeing in mind. Teaching and learning are life-giving and can be a lifeline. Though our energy is low, and our grief is high, we can do some simple things to ease the load and finish well. 

At first blush, the rest of the world’s shift to virtual learning in March seemed immaterial to our constituents who are in a heavily online MA in Jewish Education. We are lucky to boast well-trained and experienced online faculty and, perhaps even more important, students who are whizzes with Zoom, Schoology, and an array of online educational tools. Our people are at home in their virtual academic community. They already knew to mute themselves when not speaking in a teleconference, so we were really ahead of the game!  Honestly, we felt immune to the whiplash others were experiencing with the very abrupt shift to online teaching and learning. And yet, ‘business as usual’ has been very UNusual. As a parent of three myself, I was quick to recognize the double demands that would be placed on working parents. This affects both our faculty and student body, many of whom are caring for young children and/or aging parents while working full-time in Jewish education. With childcare centers closed and many dual-career families trying to work remotely, this complexity appeared on our radar quickly. A few weeks after moving all courses online, we announced that Hebrew College would not be holding an in-person graduation in June. Especially for distance students, who cannot wait to finally bring their families to campus, hug their classmates and teachers, and wear a cap and gown to symbolize all that they have invested in their degrees, this was a huge blow. And now, we have gone from a trickle to a steadier flow of job losses, furloughs, and professional uncertainty. For the soon-to-be-graduates, many have gone from looking at the many pathways forward for their careers to worrying about their next paycheck in their current role. Even though our students are well-versed in learning online and forging and maintaining deep relationships over Zoom and FaceTime, this experience has been difficult. And so, I imagine for those faculty and students for whom virtual learning is new, and are experiencing the same stressors and uncertainties as I’ve described, this experience is multi-layered and fraught. With that in mind, I’d like to share my approach to graduate education, which builds on what I’ve learned over a decade-plus teaching virtually and adapts it for the moment at hand. • Focus first on the ‘extracurricular.’ With so much uncertainty and added stress in their personal and professional lives, students need to use the reflective space of the classroom to process their experiences—and to channel them into future material for growth. To my mind, this now trumps any other course objective. Once grounded and feeling seen (and this must happen repeatedly throughout the crisis), students will have greater capacity to engage in the material and hopefully reach many of the original course objectives. Do this by creating distinct spaces and times for processing and opportunities to grieve for whatever feels lost—this may be one-to-ones with faculty, a discussion board set aside for this purpose only, and/or facilitated/recurring peer conversations. These multiple entries allow for all types of processing so that students can find their comfort zone. • Uncoverage over coverage. Given time lost in the shift to online learning, and significant class time invested in shoring students up by reinvesting in relationships and care, it seems impossible that everything can still be covered. Though I toyed with it briefly, I shied away from upping the expectations of time for my course this spring in recognition of the physical and emotional work so many students were balancing on the home front. So, I focus on uncoverage rather than coverage. What happens when we let go of covering every thinker in a time period? Does it allow us to delve more deeply into one theologian?  Or perhaps explore a single theme across many generations of thinkers?  Allowing students the space to unpack (or uncover) texts, analyze them critically, and relate them to what’s happening in their lives today may make for better integration and assimilation of the material in the end. • Expect less, but give more. Where you can, lighten the reading load by removing a non-essential reading, mark one or more tangential sessions optional, and let students know that you will approach their work with an especially generous heart this semester. This is not meant to suggest compromising our academic standards, but to adjust them in places where flexibility exists. Recognize that students may have less to give academically but at the same time need more mentorship, empathy, and care—and try to navigate your own personal-professional juggle to accommodate those needs. To me, this is the most important thing I will ever teach my students. As teachers of theology, religion, religious education and thought, we have an added responsibility—and privilege—to create caring communities that recognize the holistic nature of our students’ lives. I am always mindful that when I teach these students, who are themselves the shapers of young Jewish hearts and minds, I am modeling both a pedagogical and ethical approach to creating a classroom community—be it ‘real’ or really virtual.