Dear Professor: A Chronicle of Absences is an open access book on JSTOR that features more than 200 emails in which students excuse themselves for missing class.

Sample email:

Dear Professor,

Excuses section: I’m sorry that I had to leave early on Tuesday last week and was additionally unable to attend on Thursday. On Thursday something came up and I was sadly unable to attend any of my classes. For Tuesday I do not have such a good reason, if I am honest I left 20 minutes early because of a beautiful girl (the only and last time I would use this reason and I apologize, I let instinctual hedonism take over for better or worse!)

Interesting section: I have been working on this piece “To Fear with Love” and thought you might appreciate it as per our earlier discussion about writing. It is attached below for your enjoyment and I would love any feedback/criticism!

it’s been nearly a year since I’ve written an update here. back in the summer I considered updating, and this is what I put down and saved to a draft I never posted:

I’m trying to decide whether I want to blog about what it’s like to be a professor in the middle of everything. because, after all, we’re all in the middle of everything and I’m very, very, very fortunate.

here’s a thing: I GOT THE JOB TO STAY AT MY INSTITUTION. (I had a one-year position starting last fall and I was really, really hoping to stay. had to go through a full interview process and they definitely did not go easy on me--I honestly thought I did worse than the first time I interviewed there--but they chose me and I had that security about a month before everything shut down. again, VERY, VERY, VERY fortunate.)

I’m moving to a new office! I’m excited because I got to pick this time and the one I’ve been in--it’s fine but dark as heck and I like windows. no telling whether my office will matter when it comes to getting work done this year; jury’s still out on what school will actually look like when we’re about to start it in a month. (yes, there’s an official plan, but especially where I am plans can change/have been changing.)

and there’s been some stuff going down. some institutions are letting faculty choose to delay or pause their tenure clocks due to the general teaching situation right now being less than ideal, but I’m not sure what I’ll try to do.

I’m teaching three classes I’ve taught before this fall, but I’m doing each of them differently (one VERY differently) so I still have to write like two and a half syllabi. plus attendance has always been a tricky subject and will now be an even stranger factor to contend with.

it’s interesting getting to see that draft now and see the things I was worrying and thinking about. as an update/answer to my own questions, here’s some of what the semester has been like:

yes, the new office made a huge difference, especially since I negotiated for a separate monitor so I’m not hunching over my desk to work on my laptop. besides the simple fact that I have windows.

my institution decided to open on schedule and hold hybrid classes (in-person and online, synchronous). none of us expected to sustain the hybrid model for long--especially when other institutions (though many of them R1s and not therefore our exact peers) opened in the weeks before us to sometimes dramatically disastrous results. but hybrid classes persist. we’re going to make it all the way to Thanksgiving.

we junior faculty at my institution will get to decide in a couple of years whether we need extra time on our tenure clocks, a decision I’m immensely grateful for.

my three classes are... going.

one major thing that happened to me very recently is that I had a book accepted for publication(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). since I’m at a teaching institution, this alone isn’t an automatic guarantee of tenure, but it’s much-needed and -appreciated validation. the contract has still yet to be drawn up, so I’ve got that whole process ahead; but in the midst of this year it was a very good thing.

I tweeted about a dream, then realized it should be a television show, so I tweeted the whole first season plot. Featuring an academic who has to solve a murder so she doesn’t have to teach another class, and her librarian sidekick who is very helpful because of the research she’s done while writing Sherlock and Veronica Mars fanfiction. The whole thread is on Twitter, but copied in plain text below the cut for your reading pleasure. #sixseasonsandamovie

first thing in the morning, I wake up and commence my morning routine. much of this is the same as it was pre-pandemic: I shower and do my makeup, make coffee (and put most of it into a thermos), eat breakfast, and try to give myself writing time before I think about the day at school ahead.

a few minutes after I wake up, my phone starts sending me push notifications to complete the daily health screening that allows me to come to campus. I’m asked to self-report symptoms and whether I have knowledge that I’ve been in close contact with anyone who had tested positive. when I complete the questionnaire, I get a message that clears me for the day. on my way out the door, I choose whichever mask best coordinates with my outfit and throw it into my purse.

when I arrive on campus, I put my mask on after parking the car. masks are required in all public spaces on campus, including outdoor spaces if you’re moving around. when I get to the front door of my building, I have to scan my ID to open the door. inside, I use the health app to scan a QR code to record where I am on campus.

in my office, I take my mask off, hanging it just beside my desk. mid-morning, building staff come by to empty trash cans and wipe door handles and light switches, and I slip on the mask whenever they knock on my door and briefly enter my space.

some of my colleagues who share a hallway with me come to campus, and I hear their doors open and close. now and then we’ll stop and have a conversation in each other’s doorways (by which I mean one person in or just outside the doorway, the other person seated at their desk), masks always on. our building used to be busy with tons of faculty offices and students dropping by for office hours, but we’ve all moved our office hours virtually and our floor doesn’t have classrooms on it, so the only student we see is the student worker if we happen to stop by the printer room. some faculty have permission to teach entirely remotely for health or family reasons. the building is uncannily quiet.

some days I bring lunch, keeping it in the refrigerator in our work room. all our hallways, rooms, and buildings have signs on the doors telling us which route we have to take to avoid people walking too close to each other, but as it happens I never see another soul in these rooms.

I still have to go across campus to check my mail. when I leave my office, I have to be sure I bring my keys, ID, and cell phone--all of which I need to get in and out of buildings. around the side of my building is one of our new outdoor classroom spaces--big plastic bench/desks that are spaced far apart but still close enough to the building to pick up wifi. once or twice I’ve seen a colleague holding office hours, their student sitting at the next table over.

the quads are sparsely populated if at all--all of campus feels like a ghost town. when I near the student center, I might see a handful of students eating lunch outside at picnic tables set up to accommodate social distancing. I enter the student center through the designated entrance beside the mail room, again scanning both my ID and a QR code on my phone. I enter through “enter” doors and exit through “exit” doors. if I have an errand on the upper levels of the student center, I walk all the way to one end of the building to use the “up” staircase; the other staircases are all designated as “down” only.

if I’m picking up lunch from the dining hall, I scan a QR code and check in with the staff, showing them the health pass on my phone that confirms I’m allowed to be on campus. the dining hall floor is covered in arrows and spacing markers to indicate proper social distancing. all plates, cups, and cutlery are disposable. to-go boxes are in high demand, so I’m unlikely to get one: I bring a plastic bag to hold my individually-packaged salads and dessert(s) so I can carry my open plate. all semester I haven’t seen more than a handful of students eating in the dining hall at once.

if I happen to meet another faculty member I know, we go upstairs to a huge, empty overflow dining room and sit in carefully-spaced chairs as we eat lunch together. otherwise, I take my lunch to my office and eat alone. on the days of our regular professional development lunches, I listen in to our Zoom call; but most of us don’t like eating on camera. except for the people presenting, even our own meetings are mostly full of little black “video off” squares. before the meetings begin, the hosts attempt small talk; but Zoom doesn’t allow for out-loud side-conversations. I usually pull up something else on my other screen as our Zoom call is going, even if I’m interested and paying attention. I think we all do, sometimes, even when we have our video on. my email is full of notifications from student health about this or that student who is out of class until x date. most of the students I receive emails about still log on to our class Zoom call.

after lunch, I teach. on the afternoons I teach one class, I have to leave my office at least 15 minutes before class begins even though I’m only going to the building next door. I print out any papers I need, load up my tote bag with all the components of my technology setup, retrieve a camera called a Meeting OWL from a locked closet (I borrow it from my colleague who teaches in the same room right after me), and then heft my full tote bag, the box the OWL comes in (almost as big as the tote bag), and my water bottle over to my second-floor classroom. I scan my ID to get into the building; like the building with my office, there’s only one “enter” door and “up” staircase. in the classroom we’re not allowed to move desks, but various pieces of the professors’ workstation get moved around a lot, so after I scan the QR code marking me present in my own classroom, I have to move a table, a podium, and a chair so that the HDMI cord reaches my laptop. I turn on the projector system and adjust the volume all the way up. I plug in my laptop to the power because it can’t run a full eighty-minute Zoom call without dying and to the ethernet because the wireless connection is randomly bad in that building some days. I plug in the OWL camera to the wall and to my computer. I open the Zoom call, make sure the projector is working, and start admitting students from the waiting room. I make sure Zoom is set to use the OWL as my camera and that sound goes through the classroom speakers. no more than three students trickle into the classroom; I ask them to show me their health passes because that’s part of our procedure. this was hard to keep track of in the first couple of weeks of the semester, but now I don’t even have to consult the sticky note of instructions I taped onto my laptop before the first day of class.

when class begins, I make sure the meeting is recording and that I can see the waiting room and the chat on the big screen. occasionally, this classroom has inexplicable audio issues and my Zoom students have to tell me the audio is “screeching.” usually if I mute and un-mute myself a few times in succession we fix the problem; but the internet connection is not so easily fixed. once this semester I had to abandon the classroom after 20 minutes and retreat back to my office to get a stable internet connection. the in-person students had to go back to their dorms and log on to their computers to finish class.

the class meeting is fine. the students are interested in the material and are frequently invited to speak from their personal experience, so discussion happens in spite of everything. but this is a class in which I made a special effort to learn “Zoom silence,” which is much longer than your usual classroom silence because you can only really see one or two people’s faces. sometimes I call on students and worry that they won’t answer, which is silly, because it’s their job to answer; but I still feel anxious about it. some students send me private messages in the Zoom call that they have to step away for a moment or that they’re going to the restroom--and although I don’t ask or require them to do that at all, it helps when I know that someone is definitely not going to answer right away.

assuming we make it through class with relatively few tech issues, I end class five minutes early so that I can pack up my things and give the next professor time to setup his various tech. this is also supposed to help with traffic in the hallways--to keep students from piling up in any one place--but not once this semester have I seen more than four or five students in an entire classroom building hallway at one time. students who don’t have a class immediately after mine will hang back to help clean, taking a paper towel and the class supply of disinfectant and wiping down their desks. I take care of the rest, spraying and wiping all the surfaces we’ve touched, even though it makes one of the tables I use particularly sticky. when I’ve unplugged and packed everything, I head back to my office.

on the afternoons I teach two classes, I’m in a different building with a different tech setup. my other classroom has a standing desk, which I prefer over having to teach sitting down. here, I plug in the computer to the wall, the ethernet, and the HDMI cable that goes to the projector. I unfold and plug in my folding document camera, a small clip-on webcam (although my laptop has a webcam) that I can swivel back and forth to try to capture more of the classroom, and a giant round directional microphone (not ideal, since students can’t hear me if I stand behind it--but it works better than my laptop or webcam microphones).

classes proceed in more or less the same way as the other classroom, though these classes involve more switching between cameras (which involves random, odd moves such as “advanced-share screen the doc cam instead of switching cameras because if you click ‘switch camera’ everything shows up backwards”). the doc cam is my whiteboard--even though I have a perfectly good and functional whiteboard--because we found out early on that cameras don’t pick up the whiteboard well.

the first day I taught my two classes back-to-back, I was scheduled to move to a classroom across the hall for the second class. I had to wait for a colleague to pack up her complex, multi-part tech setup and then redo my entire setup, which meant I started class frazzled and nearly ten minutes late. so I don’t move classrooms anymore. it turns out the class I was moving for is completely remote due to the professor’s health accommodations, so no one is trying to use the classroom after me.

in my second class, I often have only one student physically present in spite of expecting I’d have at least six or seven per class (and this was after I divided my class into two shifts who would have the opportunity to attend in-person every other day). since small group work is so important in this class, my lone in-person student often has to join the Zoom call just for breakout rooms; and I can’t drop in to that student’s breakout room once they’ve started. the college learned early on that if two people in the same room are on the same Zoom call with audio on, the audio begins to echo and then quickly mutates into something that sounds like someone has opened a terrifying, hellish wormhole. you can’t have more than one person in a Zoom call in the same room unless everyone is completely muted.

still, breakout rooms are often silent or chat-conversations only (comprised of things like can you hear me? and so-and-so your mic isn’t working and send me your emails for the Google doc). I know some of the students do the work and some don’t. I could have them turn things in individually to prove they’re thinking or working, but I don’t like the way that feels. I have no idea how to help them get out of the class what they normally would in the ways of conversation and community.

I try to make sure every student can see me listening to them when they speak, but I spend most of my time facing my computer. there are simply more students online, and I’m worried more about whether they can hear me than whether the student in-person can hear me from six feet away. sometimes in this classroom I accidentally end up literally turning my back on my in-person student(s), which I feel horrible about. but I have to be watching the chat for answers and also writing on a piece of paper under the document camera. I can’t step further away from the document camera, and I can’t move among the desks like I used to.

when each class is over, we wipe desks and surfaces as needed. I unplug everything and pack it back into my tote bag. sometimes it’s so still in the upstairs hallway that the automatic lights turn off. sometimes I’m so still in the classroom that the automatic lights go off on me, and students with their cameras on giggle to see me flailing an arm around to get the lights back on. the few people who attend in-person have long cleared the building by the time I’m ready to go, and I descend an empty “down only” staircase and walk back across an empty quad to the building where my office is.

when I return to my office and pack up for the day--when I don’t have a department meeting or an appointment with a colleague (all of which occur--where else?--on Zoom)--I make sure to take my laptop and charger cord home with me. I double-check that I’m not leaving behind any materials I would absolutely need to conduct the next few days of classes. every day, I pack up my office as if I won’t be back for two weeks, because I never know if I’m going to wake up the next morning with symptoms--or else if I’m going to be notified that having a student present in my classroom counts as having “close contact” with them, although our classrooms are measured out to make sure everyone sits six feet apart.