I don’t have much to add to my reflection on week 2 of online classes. I’ve continued weekdaily naps, as well as walks and runs. My attention and promptness to my schoolwork was not as good this week as it was in week 2; in general, I was more distracted from work, so I started it later in the day.
One welcome improvement is that my politics professor has shortened class slightly by removing the full-class discussion that would follow the small group discussions. This full-class discussion was never particularly engaging because it tended to rehash the same points we had just spent half an hour discussing in small groups, and in addition, very few people would participate. One other thing I noticed about discussion is that it’s much harder to have a productive discussion when half of your group hasn’t done the reading. Go figure.
I register for next semester’s classes on Wednesday. A primary concern in building my schedule has been the not insignificant chance that classes next semester may also be online, at least for part of the semester. To account for this, I’m trying to build a schedule where all my classes are in the afternoon, by Eastern time. This way, I’ll have a more manageable schedule taking classes from California. What makes this somewhat difficult is that I’m also interested in taking as many classes as possible in my major departments (math and computer science), which tend to schedule classes at the same times, leading to a number of conflicts in my ideal schedule. The four classes that I most want to take are scheduled in two time slots, with one math class and one CS class per slot. If it becomes clear that classes next semester will certainly be in person, then I gain some flexibility because I can take morning classes. I do think this is more likely than not, but I want to plan for the case that we continue distance learning.