If every week I spend a total of ten hours grading, twenty-five hours teaching, forty hours sleeping, and fifty-one and a half hours e-mailing students who are having technical difficulties, how many hours do I have left to watch “Interior Design Masters” on Netflix? What if I stop showering?
If we move back to in-person learning, students are supposed to remain six feet away from their closest neighbors. My classroom is roughly twenty feet by twenty-five feet. There are twenty-seven of you. In the space provided below, please draw what you see when you stare into the abyss.
If the school’s budget is unexpectedly cut by ten per cent and the school’s forty-five teachers take a six-per-cent pay cut while administrators take a zero-per-cent pay cut, will your generation finally be the one to dismantle a system in which the powerful exploit the less powerful with impunity?
If my cat has become emboldened by my many hours at home, and spends ninety-five per cent of his time sprawled across my wrists and computer keyboard, kkdfhuojjjjjjjj323@,,,,>>fff?
Sam decides to install a tennis court in his back yard, because all the experts keep recommending tennis as a safe pandemic activity and his property is enormous. The court is twenty-eight feet wide and seventy-eight feet long. What are some anti-racist organizations that Sam could have donated all that tennis-court-building money to?
This 8:30 A.M. class has twenty-four students. Yesterday, twelve of you were still asleep when class began. Five of you minimized the Zoom call so that you could play Animal Crossing. One of you joined the call and then obviously fell back asleep. What percentage of the class noticed that I was still in my pajamas and also drinking wine?
Train A, travelling at forty miles per hour, leaves Boston for New York at 1 P.M. Train B, travelling at sixty miles per hour, leaves New York for Boston at 2 P.M. The distance between the stations is a hundred and ninety miles. The passengers glance out the windows; they sip their dining-car coffees; they notice that the maple leaves have just begun to turn. Remember the muted joy of train travel?
A typical class is fifty minutes long. “Fuck tha Police” by N.W.A. is five minutes and forty-three seconds long. Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” is two minutes and thirty-three seconds long. If I create a Spotify playlist that is just those two songs on repeat, how many times will each song play in the course of a class period? How many angry parent phone calls will I receive? How many episodes of “Interior Design Masters” will I have been able to watch because I didn’t spend the night before meticulously planning a lesson for an educational modality that we’re learning as we go?
If only sixty-five people are allowed in Wegmans at one time and Elizabeth is twenty-fifth in line, how much time does Elizabeth have to contemplate the fact that Wegmans is basically the same size as our school building and we have six-hundred goddam students?
If I say, “Wait! You have to unmute your mike!” approximately thirty-nine times during a remote-learning school day, and there are a hundred and seventy-five school days in a year, isn’t that still preferable to actual human deaths?
If my cat appears in eighty-five per cent of my Zoom lessons, should I buy him one tiny bow tie or should I buy him a tiny bow tie for every day of the week?
