It’s pretty much a known fact by now that being a college student during COVID-19 comes with an entirely new set of challenges within an already stressful environment. But, often it is forgotten that professors have been thrown into an entirely new world of teaching. Drury biology professor Don Deeds was able to shed some light on how teaching during these unprecedented times looks for him.

Dr. Deeds said that as far as classroom policies and making connections with students goes, not much has changed for him.

“Well the biggest thing is we are masked and we are six feet apart and consequently we’re much more spread out in the classroom. But, in most things the class is conducted almost precisely as it would been last spring before COVID-19. It uses the same format—I lecture and ask questions and the students talk—except now they’re spread out and it’s a little harder to hear them with their masks on my teaching techniques have been altered very little. Except for the masks making it a little hard to hear them and the fact that they’re further away—which makes it a little more difficult to interact with them, I’d say it has altered things very little. They still come to my office—masked up—and we still do things outside of class.”

Dr. Deeds doesn’t offer zoom classes for his students in quarantine but he was found a unique way to make sure his students that miss class are still kept up to date and don’t miss anything as a result of quarantine or isolation. “I do not offer anything by zoom. My experience with zoom last semester was just so disappointing, and I thought [Zoom] was so educationally pedagogically flawed that I made a decision that I would not do any of my presentation material by zoom—the zoom aspect so takes away the normal classroom presentation of material. I just can’t stand it. Quite frankly students being absent from class for long periods of time while they’re either in insolation or quarantine is the most challenging part of teaching right now. And so having students missing class has been very difficult. But my solution to that was I have appointed a class scribe who takes notes in every class period and they do an absolutely beautiful job of recording what we do in class and then I send it to students who are absent and I think it’s done a really good job of keeping those students up to date. This has worked well as an alternative to zoom for us.”

Dr Deeds looks forward to next semester and predicts that things will be closer to normal by then. “I’m fairly confident that we’re going to be—not completely back to normal, that’s a stretch—but I think that we’ll be moving in a direction that will be much closer to normal in the fall semester.”

Article by Marissa Mayfield