I ran an online student discussion session tonight, mostly to test out a new-to-me Virtual Classroom in MyLearningSpace (Laurier’s version of D2L), and partly to hear what the students were worried about.
First note – the Virtual Classroom worked better than I expected. I went in totally blind – started not sure if my microphone was working or if any students were online. They were, and it was, so the students got to hear me start with, is this working? Is anyone here? Can anyone hear me? For a while. Oh well. The students were patient and polite enough to not give me too much grief.
And just playing around live, I had slides up, was writing on them, letting students write on them (or not), students asking questions through chat, or voice – it worked. I am now confident that I can move forward. I also have a few ideas running for when we get back to normal.
Now, to the point of this post. I got a lot of questions, on Coronavirus, on the economy, about Laurier and what happens next. But one question got me thinking. How does this event compare to other big events you have lived through?
I was born in the mid-70’s. So nothing really happened until 9/11 – that is my only comparison. The students have no frame of reference for that, so I didn’t really dwell on it at the time – but it got me thinking. How does 9/11 compare? For me, there are significant connections. In particular, at the time, I was working in the aviation industry, so there was a similar mix of personal fear and professional chaos.
The difference is that with 9/11, the entire time, it felt like it was over. The first plane hit, and everyone assumed that was it. Until the second plane hit, and again, we assumed that was it. And the Pentagon. And then one more. But I remember a sense of holding your breath – but pretty quickly it felt like it was over. There was residual fear, what’s going to happen next – but the continual expectation was that nothing more was going to happen.
This is different. In one sense, the uncertainty is smaller – we can model how viruses spread so that we know more about what will happen next – and also larger – is work going to be normal in 1 month, 3 months, or are we waiting for a vaccine in a year?
That particular dimension of uncertainty seems important for me – the current situation feels more unsettling. It might be something boring, like nothing is unsettling when you are in your 20’s and everything is once you have kids.
But writing this has me thinking that it might relate to the distinction between risk and uncertainty (which economists use in a way that always feels backwards to me). To simplify slightly, risk is when you can assign probabilities to future events, while uncertainty is when you can’t. So, in my mind, the events of 9/11 were uncertain, while the current events are about risk. There are definitely more measurable models about virus spread than there are about how terrorists make attack plans.
Writing this was my way of thinking out loud. (For my students, please don’t write essays this way.) But in writing it I realize something – I think that I find risk more unsettling than uncertainty. Risk feels like something that I need to worry about, plan for. Since uncertainty is uncalculated, I can’t plan for uncertainty, so it doesn’t really matter.
Given that, I should go to sleep. My life right now is about risk, which creates work – which I should do tomorrow.