August 8, 2021

Poetry and a Bit of Despair covid-19: day 514 | US: GA | info | act

“ But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all—
children and fools . . . ” — Homer, the Odyssey, 1.11–13

I worked a bit on the poetry index of LitWiki today. I also added a few poems to get a good template model posted. I still wish I could make a template that easily include the formatting stuff, but I can’t quite figure it out. Still, having students post poems and then annotate them could be a great project. It could also be a disaster.

We have convocation in-person tomorrow which is causing me anxiety. I just can’t believe I live in a red state that has politicized this pandemic. We are pretending that the pandemic is over, only encouraging students to wear masks and get vaccinated. This is capitalism pushed to absurdity: only when we treat students as customers who we want to make happy by any means can we shirk our ethical responsibility to make them do the right thing. I’ve said it once, and I’m sure to say it again: there is a complete failure of leadership in this state, and now I can’t even do anything to further protect myself. I must be in my classroom during scheduled classes, even if I’m having them do something else. Not only do we continue to infantilize the students, but now our professionalism is being checked up on, as if we're Hardee’s burgerflippers who will slack off as soon as the assistant manager’s back is turned. The biggest insult, though, has to be that the same people who are compelling us to resume campus business-as-usual are the same ones that have refused to get vaccinated and have extended this pandemic into a second even-more-dangerous wave. I’m so sick of it.

To celebrate this stupidity, I’m bring back my COVID-19 day count above, and it sickens me that today is day 514 since March 12, 2020 when I began keeping track. Children and fools...