Shayna Connelly, Associate Professor,
DePaul University has two children –
a 13 year-old (7th grade) with documented IEP/accommodations and a 10 year-old (in 5th grade).

"My husband was working from home. He was able to do much of the domestic work and could monitor the kids’ school to an extent. If they had tech issues, I needed to step in to solve the problem. Part of my situation that was critical was my house. Constant interruptions from my kids are still an issue. My office is on a back porch off the kitchen. It does not have a door I can close and only a half-wall partitioning it. Despite conversations about how interruptions hurt (and sometimes completely kill) my train of thought, I cannot get my kids to leave me be unless they have screen time. Their screen time increased already and I don’t want to extend it to all day.

The kids’ mourning everything they’d lost became a priority that needed to be addressed in the moment any time it was expressed. In the beginning it was near constant and after a few weeks it was intermittent. They asked repeatedly and often when they would be allowed to go back to school, they would cry or get frustrated and angry just like with any grieving process. Even for tween/teen kids, these are big feelings to process and despite their language abilities and understanding of the world, hard to articulate. Regular Zoom chats for my daughter helped, though they required a lot of planning among a group of mothers, which was added labor for me. Both kids regressed and started playing with toys they’d outgrown or re-reading books that comforted them. My son, who is normally not very physically affectionate started reaching out to me every time I passed by him and in addition will come in to check on me to give me a hug several times a day.

Image by Shayna Connelly of DePaul University of her home office in her insulated back porch with a newly installed curtained partition.

We were near the end of our quarter and I preemptively canceled my week 10 classes and worked individually with students to accommodate their final assignments that were planned but suddenly not feasible. Overnight I also went from being fully prepped for three classes (an overload for me) to not-at-all prepared. All my classes had to be scrapped because they were designed for face-to-face. I started accommodating my students with their finals while also scrambling to turn three spring quarter directing classes – all of which were heavily experiential – into effective online courses. We have a strong Industrial Design department and they started offering tech workshops to support professors. I needed to learn new tools to help me even though I have significant experience with online learning. 10 years ago I went through training, took 18 months to develop a fully online course and have taught it every year since. All of that along with lots of teaching experience and curriculum design positioned me well to do this pivot to online and it still took a huge toll on me physically and emotionally. I was working week-by-week rewriting and recording lectures, changing the specifics of assignments to make them manageable and did additional written responses on student assignments in order to maintain their engagement.

There was a huge uptick in advising via email that lasted through finals and spring break. I did 50% more advising than usual just in those two weeks. One of my advisees started treating me like his administrative assistant and I had to tell him my role was not to look up email addresses for other professors on the website for him. That instance felt particularly demeaning and draining, especially when he didn’t ask a male junior faculty member to do that.

I had to ‘bug’ my students more than usual with check-ins if they seemed to be falling off the grid, but unlike in other quarters they seemed to need and appreciate this sometimes. This paralleled pestering my kids to keep up with their assignments and reading, but honestly, I did not care much what my children turned in and did not harangue them. I am in the minority viewing my kids’ situation as an opportunity for self-examination, growth and experimentation. My college students were paying for classes, some of them were graduating and that made this a different kind of opportunity for them. 

My concentration and cognitive abilities were so fragile that this was especially problematic for the first two months of shelter-in-place. During our first faculty meeting in spring quarter someone suggested an alternate way to book meetings. I nearly had a nervous breakdown. The suggestion was not unreasonable, the process was not complicated, but it was straw that threatened to break me entirely.

The single most important thing children at every level needed was support and security. Success is not a priority in a pandemic, which is a realization that comes over time. Stability for the kid was not the same as continuity. I should mention we live in a wealthy first tier suburb of Chicago where many parents work in professional fields and many have graduate degrees. I became irritated with parents who were trying too hard to ensure their children’s continuous academic success because in many cases it seemed to be about the parents’ egos. This semi-public flailing of teachers that started almost immediately when our kids started remote learning and has increased exponentially now that the school year is over and the District is looking at fall plans. Often the critics cite, “not getting our tax dollars’ worth,” of education, which reveals an attitude of education as commodity. When I tried to support teachers who’d been insulted and maligned on our towns’ social media pages I became personally a target. All the suggestions were terrible pedagogy (“8 hours of synchronous zoom meetings” is common). Underlying these complaints are the failings of our work, social and educational systems. For many parents, school is child care and teaching is authoritarian. “Open child’s skull, insert knowledge, child tests well, gets into a ‘good’ college and gets a ‘good’ job.” The ignorance and cruelty floored me.

I am not my kids’ teacher. I’m only their parent and I would like that to become the mantra for parents everywhere."

Anonymous, Professor of Film,
parent to a 6 year-old in 1st grade.

"My partner and I are both full time professors, so we were juggling parenting with moving our courses online. [The first weeks of shut down are] a bit of a blur to be honest. My partner and I have always needed to “split the time” in caring for our daughter since we are both FT professors and practicing artists. We developed a system (prior to the shutdown, but which became more refined as a result) where we split the day from 10-2 and 2-6, so one of us could work while the other watched our daughter for four hours, and then we switched. There were occasional conflicts, like having meetings at the same time, but they tended to work out by plugging our daughter in next to us and hoping she’d be quiet and well-behaved! Having my child at home rendered me incapable of holding any type of synchronous teaching or really doing any school-related work while she was in my direct care.

Image of a Professor's work desk and that of their daughter's virtual learning space, to the right.

There was added work as the shutdown happened including revision of syllabi, development of online teaching methodologies, maintaining online office hours, calling students who “disappeared”, making accommodations for students in inequitable technological and other scenarios (which I was happy to do – it was just a lot of extra work), offering more incompletes (which extends the school year beyond our contract), generally staying in touch with students more, and online advising for the Fall 2020 semester. Service stayed the same although online meetings became more frequent.

Administrators must be mindful of our childcare duties in general. The inability to be online 24/7, the inability to completely devote ourselves to our jobs. This is looking to be an even greater issue for the Fall, as our university is requiring us to be back in the classroom without making any accommodations for childcare issues (i.e. schools / daycares being closed or on erratic schedules that will ultimately clash with our teaching schedules). To be honest, everyone being home this past Spring will most likely be easier than what I foresee happening in the Fall. It gives me a lot of anxiety.

Something else infuriating is that my university sent out the same set of student evaluation questions at the end of the semester, without revising for emergency online teaching. I am fully promoted so it doesn’t “matter” as much for me, but I worry about my colleagues who need those evaluations to be as accurate as possible and may be penalized for “bad” ones. This summer, the university is working on a set of best practices for emergency instruction (I am on this committee) and some equity-based expectations are being included. My particular university is hellbent on being back in the classroom at the expense of student and faculty health and wellbeing, they have not provided many guidelines or updated for more effective emergency remote teaching."

Kristy Guevara Flanagan, Associate Professor,
UCLA, Head of the Documentary Track,
parent to a 7 year-old in 2nd grade

"I’m a single parent and her dad lives out of the area. So, I’m the head of the household and the person mostly responsible for her care in a day-to-day basis. At first, as a single parent, I’m going shopping and didn’t want her going grocery shopping with me because I didn’t want to expose her. I didn’t really know what to do. Her school shut down before my in-person classes did. I ended up spending hundreds of dollars and hired a babysitter to come just to finish out the quarter.

When the next quarter began, her school (which was in my eyes childcare) had many different steps of trying to figure out how they were going to try to teach the kids. Normally, she would be in school and then in after-care for me to do my job. So, I had to feed her all the time. I had to clean up after her messes. I had to make sure she was getting into every Zoom. They would do a half hour Zoom and then a half hour break and a half hour Zoom and then a half hour break. We had to set timers to make sure she was getting into those Zooms and I’d have to check on her to make sure she was doing something fairly productive and not on TV at least in the morning. I was begging her dad to come down on the two days that I taught. He more or less moved back in with us because now he could work remotely. I don’t think I could have done it without that for sure.

At the university, there were some students that are in their first year and are in a rotation where they shoot week by week. So, when the university shut down, there were students who had not shot yet and they were devastated. They had put money toward their production and were halted immediately. So, you have to caretake for your students. I was getting a lot emails with concerns about what going to happen. Asking what our university was formally deciding. A lot of students wanted to get money back. I was trying to help and assist individual students that were reaching out to me. When anything happens to my doc students, they call me.

Image by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan from her workspace looking at her daughter's desk.

It was all extremely stressful. My daughter was totally unmotivated to do the work and didn’t have any structure suddenly. I didn’t know what my own rules were going to be. I had to keep working. It was very difficult. The teachers were like, don’t worry about it. I had to let her education slide for a little while. And she was in front of a screen a lot. She was scared. She started sleeping with me again. She had some kind misplaced phobia about someone stealing her. That became increased and wasn’t able to go to bed easily. Still to this day, she’s sleeping with me. Bedtime is super drawn out, takes an hour and a half to fall asleep and cuddle. I still have little time to myself. We moved and now have a new home. We live near friends and the girls can play and really occupy themselves.

I was just so busy during the school year that I wasn’t able to [emotionally break.] Now I’m probably doing a little bit of that. I’m processing how exhausting this is and how needy my child is. Also, the George Floyd murder happened. Students were devastated and confused. We had town halls at night. I wanted to attend them all and I am one of the few faculty of color in my department. And yet, I’ve got to make dinner for my kid. These are very hard choices to make.

I got some really mean evaluations from the students. The students’ expected more time with me and said I wasn’t focused enough. I felt pummeled by that. I feel like I’m in a department and an industry where women often don’t have kids and men often do. And in my department, there’s only one other woman that has a kid. It’s alienating and people don’t really understand the impact. I feel like – in hindsight – the faculty and the Dean could have protected us [caregivers] more and really let that students know the limitations and realities of that. Some of my students are parents as well! Administrators can check in on people that have care taking responsibilities and ask them, 'what is your schedule?' So, they know. And brainstorm about release strategies, student stipends for support, computers to overcome slow internet.

And the emails that take so much time."

Sharon Mooney, Associate Professor,
Loyola Marymount University parent to a 5 year-old

"I have a partner, and we do a pretty good job of sharing parenting responsibilities equally. He does most of cooking/shopping and I do most of the cleaning/organization. We don’t have any sort of family support where we are, which left us fairly isolated once the State declared the shelter in place/stay at home orders. I don’t think I left our apartment for a month that wasn’t just for a family walk around the neighborhood.

My child’s school started online on March 16th. At first, his synchronous classes were from 8:45am-2:00pm with a few breaks, but they reduced the school day online to be from 8:45am-12:00pm after they realized this wasn’t working for the kids at this age. He is not the sort of child who works independently. He is also a very social child, so after the school one of us would play with him outside, depending on our schedules and deadlines. I realized a couple of times that I had gone for days without showering.

We live in a small two-bedroom apartment. My partner and I both set up our workstations in the dining room. I spent a lot of additional money setting up a functional workspace. I have a desktop in my school office that was provided by the University that I don’t have literal room for at home. I reconfigured the living room to set [my son] up with a desk. I also became tech support for him. The first week or two of his online learning was riddled with problems and he would also do things like block the camera or microphone all of a sudden. When anything went wrong, it would turn into a crisis for him. My partner and I wore ourselves out trying to make things seem normal for our child. I was also stocking up on groceries and medicine the couple weeks before the lockdown, but felt underprepared.

Image by Sharon A. Mooney of her dining room which now includes her teaching and work desk, the work space of her partner, and their child’s classroom/art space.

One of my administrative responsibilities is to manage a handful of graduate teaching assistants. Our graduate teaching assistants were paid for the entire semester but were asked to stop working immediately at shut down, so I built out lab exams for the faculty to administer. I dedicated a lot of time to revise the requirements without graduate assistants, while keeping the classes and requirements as consistent and intact as possible. I was also meeting with Avid about student software access, compiling student names/software needs with our tech staff, and researching potential replacement options and online tools. This is along with teaching my full load. We finally had to come up with alternative projects for the students – undergraduate and graduate – who had not yet shot their films.

All of these things happened in a week.

During this week we did not hold classes so we could pivot to fully remote classes and so students could move out of the dorms. Later, we were asked to “please account for” the lost course content/hours by creating additional work/projects for the students, that created more prep and grading for us. This honestly felt like a slap in the face. Many of the full-time faculty were working around the clock during these additional hours, revising our entire course load, and helping with other classes staffed by part-timers.

After that, we had a lot of additional faculty meetings. We had two full faculty meetings, two town halls – one school and one university, multiple department meetings, curriculum alignment discussions to adapt projects, end of semester thesis and class screenings for an entire week, etc. Some other faculty members would schedule meetings at night time with the expectation that we would be free, when I was not.

Because I also teach specialized post production classes, we have an issue with equipment and hardware access for some students, which is not easy to predict. Teaching online actually requires more hours than teaching in the classroom. Understanding the differences between each discipline and not taking a one size fits all approach to online teaching is important. Adapting to each student’s individual needs was important, as they were all experiencing different forms of problematic situations caused by the pandemic. Extending deadlines, grading with their technology issues in mind, and using different criteria to evaluate participation or engagement were important tactics for me. Completely adapting my production class to focus on DIY methods was critical. They usually want to go big, and we talked about what it was to go small and have more freedom and flexibility in doing so

I personally took a lot of cues from the methods my child’s elementary school teachers were using online. They adjusted and pivoted when they realized something wasn’t working, which I appreciated. The public-school district mandated that no student would be punished by lowered grades during the pandemic. Grades could go up, but not down. This considered things like family responsibilities, family stresses, and technology access. The district provided resources and drop off centers so students could access food. It seemed like vulnerability of not just the student, but possibly the entire family unit, was considered in some of their decisions.

There was an evening where my partner found me crying hysterically because I hadn’t given written feedback to 12 student films by the deadline I had promised. I went to bed, barely slept, and got up very early to try to get them notes with some sort significance. I also broke emotionally when thinking (or actually obsessing) about what would happen if both my husband and I got sick or if we both died. All of our family is on the East coast, and all of them have pre-existing conditions even if we could get our kid to one of them.

I have been fighting feeling disappointed. Half of me tells me that I’m selfish for being disappointed when there’s a global crisis and I should focus on what I did get done. Half of me tells me I’m allowed to be disappointed with missed screenings, and cancelled projects and festival juries. Although through this I was also finishing the edit of a friend’s feature, I feel like I haven’t done enough and am failing to live up to the expectations of my department. I don’t know if I have the bandwidth to try to make something new over the summer.

I don’t know that I have recovered emotionally. I am not sleeping and filled with anxiety, although maybe it’s slightly less, or it has become normalized.

I am a proponent of learning through play. I subscribe to this philosophy in my own classes too. It’s hard, if not impossible, to create that space for play both for small kids who might need the physical interaction, and for adults who have learned over time that play based learning is not worth time or money. I can frame play as a “mode of exploration and risk taking” during in-person classes more effectively than when I try to do it online.

I appreciate watching my kid figuring out how to be bored. Because he is a super social kid and because we live in an apartment with limited outside space, he always had playdates and activities galore. He was overscheduled, and now that he is not, he is beginning to figure out how to be by himself. Not much, but a bit."