January 4, 2020: We were on our usual interview trip in China for the PhD program. The first student we interviewed, coincidentally enough, was from Wuhan University. The irony of that would be evident within about 3 weeks.

March 4, 2020: Admit the stirrings of concerns, travelled out to San Francisco. The most evident thing was people not lingering as much in shared spaces, and lots of scrubbing of surfaces. During free time, I was not hanging out with my computer at the local Starbucks, but rather sitting in a less crowded lounge area of the hotel.

March 11, 2020: As I was flying back from San Francisco, the University of Michigan was announcing its decision to close down for two days and let everyone go home. I was not teaching that term, for which I was quite happy. I started to worry about the fall, though, and the loss of student-student social aspects of learning, and particularly about the impossibility of testing fairly. Heads down on Book C… easy enough to stay home with.

By May-June, it seemed pretty clear and advisable to me that fall term was going to be online (and I wrote my cruise ship essay here at this site). I also ended up completely bringing writing to a halt as I started to think about the fall 2020 term.

It took weeks to master an online testing system and develop new genres of questions, all of which to try and stick with machine scoring only, but still preserve what would could get with open response, while at the same time circumventing as much cheating as possible by delivering individual exams to individual students. I could never solve the “friendly expert sitting with you” problem, but I was pretty sure I could stop collaboration.

Learning how to do this, and then actually doing it, was a huge (and I mean YUGE) time sink. I got nothing written July-Dec 2020, and came back up for air in January 2021.

The fact that I am coming back up for air in March 2022 tells you everything about the last 15 months you might want to know.