If you’re a journalist and you’re about to write a spluttering article that talks about students ONLY getting X HOURS of contact time or NO f2f TEACHING it’s an OUTRAGE, can I suggest that you remember that we are in a pandemic and quietly close the word document

Most staff hate online teaching — or, at least, hate this weird cobbled-together version of online teaching, on modules we’ve been rewriting all summer, with resources we don’t have, with skills we’ve had to frantically learn. We’re not doing this because it’s fun or less work.

I would love everything to go back to normal so that I could sit in a seminar room for two hours to work through gobbet handouts, or give lectures about historiography in rooms of hundreds of people, or walk through the cafe near my office and see all our undergrads chatting.

But I can’t do those things BECAUSE WE ARE IN A PANDEMIC.

(Also if you’re a journalist who is working from home, and you wouldn’t go and sit in a small office with fifteen colleagues at the moment, maaaaaaybe cool it on the studied confusion as to why we’re not all back in the classroom)

(Likewise if you’re a journalist who has moaned about zoom calls being tiring, or who has bemoaned trying to run an online meeting with more than five people in it, maaaaaybe stop being baffled that we aren’t offering hours and hours of synchronous seminars)