SCgal wrote:
My college will holding in-person classes for spring semester starting at the end of January. I've decided to teach all of my classes online. I'm the department chair so I can pretty much do what I want. I'm planning on retiring in 2022 anyway so they would do me a favor if they fired me. I'm not going to take the risk of being in a classroom for 3 hours straight with college students who think Covid is a hoax. Hope you all are living in a place where sanity prevails.
I have almost the opposite problem to yours, here in California. We have already been told that we are totally online for spring semester. There is some possibility of having in-person courses in summer session, and as department chair I have to decide whether we want to do this. Most of the courses we offer during the summer include labs, and the "remote" labs we used in the fall, and will use again in the spring, are sort of a joke. From a pedagogical point of view I should dig my heels in and insist that all labs are taught in person for the summer. However, if I do that our enrollments will plunge since most of our students are not living here this year with all instruction remote, and will not move back until fall. So we would lose a lot of tuition dollars. Furthermore, for summer we still have to follow COVID protocols that include halving the number of students per lab room, so it would cost nearly twice as much to run the labs (twice as many TAs would have to be hired). I'm in a bit of a quandary between doing what is pedagogically best and doing what will help the struggling bottom line of the department and the university.
I guess that's why they pay me the big bucks (a tiny administrative stipend and one course of teaching release) to be chair. I'll be happy when my term expires at the end of June. My already chosen successor will do a great job.