Extraordinary times (week 2)

I already noted key experiences from the first week of enforced working from home. At that time, we could still go out. This week, it has been lockdown, with just one walk a day and essential trips (mostly food shopping). The weather has been bright (if a little chilly) all week so it has felt surreal: everything feels fine, almost like a staycation, and yet things are so much more difficult for many other people:

• the healthcare professionals (including paramedics, porters, cleaning staff, teachers of key workers' children...) who are keeping the healthcare system functioning and putting themselves at risk for all of us.
• the people delivering essential services (including food, refuse collection, internet and more) so that it can feel like a working staycation for those of us working from home.
• people who find themselves in isolation or separated from loved ones or stuck in the wrong country as borders closed.
• people whose income has dried up, whose businesses are threatened, who aren't sure how they will pay the bills.
• parents now managing home schooling on top of everything else, and/or people supporting eldery relatives who are living independently.
• and of course people who are having to deal with the worst of Covid-19, experiencing the loss of family or friends or feeling like they have been "hit by a train" (can't remember who described it like that) themselves.

So it seems like the best way to apply my skills is to maintain "business as usual" for the students and colleagues I work with. And to stay at home to do that. In many ways it has been a mundane week.

Monday's teaching was challenging. The topic was "global healthcare" – I could not have anticipated quite how we would be viewing this topic when I planned it six months ago. I could record the lecture ahead of time, but I really wanted the students, particularly those who had experience of other healthcare systems, to share their insights. But with over 30 students joining remotely, some with very dodgy internet connections, it was impossible to involve them all, even though I'd included a "google slides" document for people to contribute key points. It all got particularly stressful when my own connection got flaky and kept dropping the audio channel. About three weeks ago, I lost my voice (laryngitis) in class, and now my internet connection was delivering virtual laryngitis. And I still haven't worked out how to make group discussions work well with 30+ participants spread around the world.

We did our first sessions of remote yoga and Pilates at home.  All furniture pushed to one side.It worked amazingly well, probably helped by the fact that we knew the teachers and most of the moves pretty well already.

On Tuesday, I had my first remote teaching session with the grandsons. The older one was keen to learn; the younger was just tired. Kahoot! quizzes were great, though I've found that creating ones tailored to the children are better than using other people's quizzes. When I invited them to do and show me a drawing it was challenging to see it, particularly since they weren't sure where the camera was at their end. But we can learn and get better. This week, the themes will be rainbows, light and eyes.

On Wednesday, I chatted with my mum over facetime. She was out in the garden, enjoying the sunshine, and seemed happy. But the sun shining on the screen meant that she couldn't really see me, so it was more like a phone call than video. I remain relieved that she is in good hands.

On Thursday, I was teaching a smaller group who all seemed to have reasonable internet connections. We shared photos and sketches of multimodal interactions in our homes, from ovens and toasters to toothpaste tubes (since we couldn't access a surgical simulator, which was the original plan), and it worked really well. I'm still not sure what the surgical equivalent of toothpaste is, but I'm sure there must be one.

That evening was the first online Zumba class. This didn't work as well as the Pilates because the Zumba experience depends more on the sense of other people around one, and also requires more space, but it was still lovely to dance like no-one's watching. Which they weren't (since I had to turn the video off to maintain the internet connection).

So it seems that people who are afflicted by Covid19 are reliant on the health service while those of us who are fortunately well so far are reliant on our internet service providers. Plus food and loo rolls. Thank you to all!

There's a short update about week 3. Things are becoming normalised until there's a major change...