By Jeran Paris
Guest Writer
PLU seeks to educate students for lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership and care – for other people, for their communities, and for the earth.
This is the mission that the PLU Provost used as a reason for continuing the semester in a complete online format instead of ending the semester early. However, based on my own and my classmates’ experiences with “distance learning” during both the largest economic and public health crises since the early 1900s, this mission being wholesale applied to students with no out, especially while recognizing that real learning can’t happen for many of us now, was a sloppy and harmful thing to do both to students and to professors.
Don’t get me wrong, I think continuing to teach is a noble and important thing right now, if the professor is in a place to do so up to a good standard. And the availability of regular coursework and opportunities to learn and get minds off the crisis at hand can be extremely valuable, if a student is in a position to take advantage of such resources.
I, for one, am still working throughout this pandemic without any reduction in hours, but instead with an increase in hours as demand rises for my company. I’ve seen an assumption that students will have more time or energy now that other things have been cancelled, and I know this to be untrue.
I am also, due to my work, unable and unwilling to be with family and have remained in off-campus housing to prevent my parents from potential exposure to Covid through myself. This has been the hardest and most mentally taxing decision so far, and no amount of FaceTime or Zoom can replace hugging my mom and petting my dogs, both of which would relieve a lot of stress.
Perhaps the greatest struggle in purely academic terms, and I know for a fact that many of my classmates suffer from the same issue, is that I am stuck at home, in my own room, which is a place of leisure and rest, and not a place of work. There is no at-home replacement for a classroom, yes, but at least we have access to the professors, more or less. However, there is absolutely no replacement, I have found, for Mortvedt Library and the other study spaces on campus, which, for my entire duration at PLU, have been some of the only places where I can truly sit down and focus on schoolwork. Working at home provides so many distractions, so many outs, that working from my bedroom and living room has been an almost insurmountable challenge, and not one to which a fix is currently available. And working outside is out of the question, as that is not where the Wi-Fi necessary for my online work is available.
The school’s administration has offered us a false dichotomy – either end the semester early and have to restart it in the fall, or do what we are doing now. These aren’t, or at least weren’t, the only options available! Perhaps students could have chosen what they want to do on an individual basis within a framework acceptable to PLU. For example, students could actually have the option to stop school and restart in the fall without repercussion, because many of us are currently set up to actually fail classes, making the pass-fail extension moot. We could have had another option to have our grades pulled at midterms if we wanted, and then done as much school as we could without adversely affecting our grades, which would actually put education first instead of putting classroom tradition first, or we could choose to continue if we weren’t happy with our grades and try to raise them by the end of the semester. In a situation where we know for a fact that there are huge disparities in how individual students are affected (great equalizer MY ASS), who does it actually help, except maybe PLU’s bank account, to force us all to continue our “education” in these conditions – and pay the full amount to PLU as we do?
