COVID STRIKES CLOSE TO HOME

Last week the coronavirus pandemic in the United States claimed another victim. And, this time, the loss was intensely personal to me and my family. My father-in-law, Paul Frelick, age 95, contracted the disease as part of an outbreak in his assisted living center here in North Carolina, despite all the precautions the staff had taken to prevent such a health disaster. He was taken from us in little more than a week. Our only consolation was that, given Paul’s advanced health directives, the fight was brief and the end peaceful.

Paul Frelick, right, in better days with son Graeme.

One of the often-told stories in our family is that I knew my father-in-law long before I ever met my husband. Paul was my faculty advisor at Beloit College in Wisconsin, as part of his duties as professor and head of the World Affairs Center there. He often invited students over to his house just off campus for get-togethers, so I’d met most of his family before I ever met my future husband. Paul always joked that he regretted he never got the chance to play matchmaker for his son and his independent-minded student. We found our way to each other on our own.

As an ordained Presbyterian minister, though, he did serve as pastor at our wedding in 1976, a year after we graduated. He did the same for my daughter Jessie and her husband in 2005 and for lots of other family members in the years in between. He was always glad to perform that service, bringing people together on a joyous occasion.

Before and after his position at Beloit, most of Paul’s work life was spent in a similar kind of service, bringing different groups together in a mutual effort to build social justice. He worked with factory labor in post-WWII Paris; directed the John Knox Ecumenical Conference/Student Center in Geneva; was a local chapter director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews in Louisville, Kentucky; served as a Presbyterian mission educator in Cameroon and Lesotho; and finally as an educator at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.

Even after he had stopped working, he was active in his Black Mountain retirement community, interviewing new residents for articles in the newsletter and meeting with a men’s group. He liked to say—and it was certainly true from my observation—that he had “failed retirement” several times.

Paul leaves behind his beloved wife of 53 years, Ellenor, and three children from an earlier marriage (my husband Graeme, brother Andy and sister Nancy). His family legacy also includes six grandchildren (including our two daughters) and six great-grandchildren (including our three grandchildren). We will all miss him profoundly.

Sadly, Donna

BLEAK SCIENCE BINGO

This week, more news from the world of science. And, given that this is 2020, the Official Year from Hell, get out your Apocalypse Bingo Cards, boys and girls, and prepare to play, because you won’t believe what the universe is throwing at us this time! 

 It’s not enough that we’ve had a worldwide pandemic, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, landslides, melting ice at both poles, an acceleration of species extinction, madmen in charge of governments around the world, wars, riots, locust invasions, Asian giant hornets and fill in the blank with whatever might be affecting your neck of the woods, now come the latest nightmares to disturb your sleep. Just shout Bingo! if you complete your row of unlikely crazy scenarios! 

Oh-so-appropriate meme courtesy Matt Jagger's Music FB Page

Don’t Plant The Seeds!—Folks in 27 states have received warnings from the U.S. Agricultural Service and the U.S. Postal Service about mysterious packages arriving in the mail containing unidentified seeds. The seeds, which appear to come from China, but which may or may not actually come from China, are unsolicited, and no one knows precisely what kind of plants will grow from them. Some people think the seeds are a plot to discredit the Chinese, some that they are simply a marketing tool to generate fake reviews on Amazon, though the senders (and the product) are obscure.  

The warnings, which have been splashed across traditional and social media are clear, though: DO NOT plant the seeds! Remember kudzu, “the vine that ate the South?” Over a hundred years ago, some bright bulb thought it would be a good idea to import it from Japan to stabilize eroded hillsides. Now we can’t get rid of it. The list of invasive plant species causing similar trouble in the U.S. because of someone’s lack of foresight is long and alarming. If you receive the seeds in the mail, contact your local post office and extension service, and mark off “alien seeds” on your Apocalypse Bingo card. 

Jumping Worms—As an organic gardener, I never would have thought an earthworm could have been the villain of the piece. In fact, I wasn’t aware there were parts of the country where earthworms weren’t native at all. But apparently New England, the upper Midwest and Canada, are devoid of native earthworms, due to the structure of the soil left behind by retreating glaciers after the last Ice Age. (Any earthworms to be found are likely imports of European species brought over in ship ballast, etc.) Forest floors don’t rely on earthworms to break down detritus, either. Other creatures—fungi, bacteria, millipedes and so on—do that job. 

Your common night crawler-type earthworm is no real threat to that kind of system. But according to an article in the New York Times, the invasive Asian jumping worm, which has been found in Oregon, the upper Midwest, parts of New England and the mid-Atlantic, and now even the southern Appalachians in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, can be devastating. It eats through masses of leaf litter and the top layer of soil much more quickly than other worms and leaves behind, not a fertile, well-aerated growing medium, but loose, crumbly, sterile soil that looks like coffee grounds and grows nothing. Yikes! They’re called “jumping worms” because of their exaggerated, thrashing movement when disturbed. They also have a distinctive whitish band around the top third of their bodies. If you find them in your yard or garden, call your extension agent right away. And, yes, you get another mark on your Apocalypse Bingo card! 

Finally, some almost good news—If you love horror movies in the apocalyptic or disaster vein, like I do, research shows you may be better equipped to deal with real-life disasters like the pandemic we’re currently enduring. A study from scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark (currently under peer review) monitored the enjoyment levels of people watching movies the scientists identified as “prepper” stories—tales of alien invasions, apocalypses and zombies—versus those of strictly “horror.” They then compared those enjoyment levels to the watchers’ reported positive experiences and “overall comfort level” during the pandemic. 

According to their results, those who most enjoyed watching the prepper stories reported the most positive experiences and higher comfort levels during the pandemic, indicating that their familiarity with the possibilities presented onscreen may have better prepared them for the reality they faced with the pandemic. They felt “better able to cope” compared to those who avoided watching movies like CONTAGION altogether. People who liked straight horror movies proved to be “psychologically resilient,” but not necessarily well prepared to deal with the realities of the moment. 

In an interview about the study with The Guardian ,Coltan Scrivner, a psychologist who specializes in morbid curiosity at the University of Chicago,said, "If it's a good movie, it pulls you in and you take the perspective of the characters, so you are unintentionally rehearsing the scenarios. We think people are learning vicariously. It's like, with the exception of the toilet paper shortage, they pretty much knew what to buy." 

So, keep watching those disaster movies, folks. You might learn something that helps you win Apocalypse Bingo! 

Cheers, Donna 

*Information for this post provided by:

 “Do NOT Plant The Mystery Seeds: People Across The US Receive Unsolicited Seed Packs From China,” by James Felton, IFLScience Newsletter, July 29, 2020. 

 “As Summer Takes Hold, So Do the Jumping Worms,” by Margaret Roach, The New York Times, July 22, 2020. 

 “Fans Of Horror And Disaster Movies May Be Better At Coping With The Covid-19 Pandemic,” by Rachel Funnell, IFLScience Newsletter, July 3, 2020.

SCHOOL'S OUT--FOREVER?

The coronavirus pandemic has thrust us into the future in some ways whether we like it or not. Forced to stay at home, even those of us who might have been ambivalent about our phones or satellite/cable connections or social media now depend on our technology much more than we had before. We Zoom and Facetime with our families and friends, work at home, meet with our doctors online, devour whatever is on Netflix or Prime Video, order food from whatever app we can on our phones, buy anything and everything from Amazon to deliver to our doors. Resistance is futile.

But the trend that the virus has accelerated at warp speed is education, with classes from kindergarten to college being held online. The problem is, as I’ve heard anecdotally from my just-graduated-from-high-school grandson, his first-grade sister and their mother, and according to the evidence stacking up from school districts around the country, online learning can be challenging in a multitude of ways. Even for kids who are bright and self-motivated, it can be boring. For kids who are struggling, it can be confusing and frustrating. For those without Internet access, computers or workspace at home, it can be impossible. And for teachers who have never learned to teach using the technology, it can be the last straw.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the experiment to educate more than 50 million K-12 students online during lockdown this school year “just didn’t work.” Teachers found the transition away from the classroom difficult, and students found the transition from what they do every day on their phones, tablets and computers for gaming and communication to what they have to do for school to be a lot harder than anyone anticipated.

 

Ugh! So bo-o-o-ring!

Part of it may be the way online classes are structured, though that may vary widely from teacher to teacher, subject to subject, and school system to school system. For example, my six-year-old granddaughter struggled with most subjects online but loved the online math games. She had never succeeded in math in a classroom setting. My grandson was a dedicated classroom student in English and history and was also good at math and science. He started online classes before lockdown as part of a special work/study program to finish his high school degree. He found the classes tedious, the equivalent, he said, of completing electronic worksheets. (I admit most work training courses I’ve had to take online have been similar—and deadly boring.) Few teachers have yet learned to really use the technology to advantage in getting lessons across. Too often they’re just translating their lectures to video, which lack even a human connection.

Many students nationwide complain that teachers give too much work with their online classes. This, apparently, is a function of not understanding fully how long it takes to complete a task on the computer, or maybe just being too enthusiastic about the new technology. It’s clear many assignments don’t take into account the circumstances many students find themselves in—a distracting environment, sharing space and computers, parents that may be working at home (or not home at all, due to work requirements), and the need for individual attention from the teacher, which may or may not be possible.

Some students do well with classes that are recorded for playback at a later time, with teachers available at set times for questions. Other students might never watch the recordings at all. Classes held on platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, with all the students present in a virtual classroom setting have their own problems, according to one eighth-grader from New York City in an opinion piece in the New York Times. Not surprisingly, Veronique Mintz observes, the same teachers that “struggle to manage students in the classroom also struggle online.”

In a suburb of Washington D.C., Fairfax County schools have had problems with two separate online platforms, first the commonly-used college system Blackboard, then, when students flooded that platform with obscene, racist and homophobic messages, the newer Google “suite” of tools, including Chat and Meet. Now students are receiving unwanted personal bullying messages from Chat, presumably authored by their virtual classmates. The school system’s IT staff are outclassed by the bullying students, who, according to Tim Schaad, a Fairfax parent and cybersecurity specialist, “are running circles around administrators.” 

 

A chaotic classroom can happen even online.

That’s a rich people’s problem, of course. Thornier still is the problem of those many students who don’t have access to computers or the Internet at all. A recent story in USAToday relates how one mom saw a teenager sitting on the curb outside a Subway in Starke, Florida with a Chromebook in his lap. She turned her car around to check on him. Turns out he was using the restaurant’s WiFi to do his homework. He had no Internet access at home. The article goes on to detail the lengths to which the Jacksonville, Florida school district has gone to provide computers and mobile hotspots to more than a third of its 110,000 students. Still, over 200 students remain without access.

Here in Madison County, in the mountains of Western North Carolina, funds are not available for such an effort. While we’re still in lockdown, kids can sit outside the library or in the parking lots of schools if they don’t have Internet at home, and some computers have been made available, but not nearly enough. So, like in years far past, the children of Appalachia will be falling further behind the longer we remain in lockdown.

At least they can remain blissfully ignorant of the cruelty their peers can deliver via Google Chat or the Comments section at “school.”

Virtually, Donna

*Information for this post provided from:

"The Results Are In For Remote Learning: It Didn't Work," by Tawnell D. Hobbs and Lee Hawkins, The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-coronavirus-remote-learning-lockdown-tech-11591375078 

"Why I'm Learning More With Distance Learning Than I Do In School," by Veronique Mintz, The New York Times, May 5, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opinion/coronavirus-pandemic-distance-learning.html 

"'Mama is tired': After school closures, some families burn out on online classes, others thrive," Emily Bloch, Florida Times-Union/USAToday, May 5, 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/05/05/coronavirus-online-classes-school-closures-homeschool-burnout/3055101001/

A TECH NIRVANA? NOT SO MUCH

If I were to write a science fiction novel based on the coronavirus pandemic I might start with a sinister premise: global technology corporations unleash a deadly virus on the world, knowing the only sensible public health response will be to order everyone to stay inside their homes, physically distant from each other. There people will be forced to rely on their computers, their smartphones, streaming services, WiFi, online school and shopping, and the Internet and satellites that support them. Normal business and commerce will be disrupted, but the tech giants will rise to rule forever! BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

 

One vision of a tech future: READY PLAYER ONE

Unfortunately, even without the conspiracy theory, this is the effect of stay-home orders all around the world—the developed world, at least. Even people who may never have attempted a video chat in their lives before are now downloading any number of apps and blithely chatting away with friends and family as if they’ve been doing it forever. I myself could use Skype, Facetime, Facebook Messenger Live Chat or Houseparty to chat, and I’ve had to fend off requests to participate in Zoom and another app (which I can’t remember) because others prefer those. I’ve resisted, arguing that, really, how many platforms do you  need to have a conversation? My doctor’s office called yesterday and insisted I add yet another app so he could charge me for an unnecessary annual check-in by teleconference. *sigh*

Then there is my television, which is a veritable cornucopia of temptation right now, with all the various streaming services offering free trial months to get me hooked under the guise of “community service” during the pandemic. Right.

I consider myself to be relatively tech-savvy for someone of my age cohort. I’m a skiffy rommer, after all, and used to thinking in futuristic terms. But I still carry a flip phone, not a smart phone. I read my emails and scroll through Facebook on the laptop or my iPad, because it’s easier to see on the bigger screen. 

That's because there are limits to technology for older folks, even though some 70 percent of us are online and using technology on a regular basis, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. We still need brighter lights, better colors and bigger text on our devices, and we often have problems when every new upgrade or app needs a whole new skill set. And those of our age cohort who are tech-savvy are the wealthiest, most urban and best educated among us, according to a study by the National Science and Technology Council.

This is all to say that I fear a large number of folks are being left out of the virtual Brave New World, many of them older.  I’ll give you an example. I got a call from a retired friend of mine, a well-educated, urbane professional woman who had worked in the communications industry for many years. She’s single, my age, living in a large city. She was going nuts sitting at home alone. She is not tech-savvy at all, not on social media, and was decrying the fact that she had downsized in preparation for a move and given away all her books. Now she had nothing to read. 

She was resistant to the idea of ebooks, even though she can’t go to a bookstore or a library, and really can’t start stacking up paperbacks again. She was resistant to the idea of video chatting, though she has a smartphone. But social isolation is a real problem for her in this time of #stayhome. And I’m sure she’s not the only one. I can’t imagine what it’s like for those who are not educated or well off.

Still, that’s just the older folk. What about people in rural areas, who have no access to the Internet? Here in my part of Western North Carolina, for example, we are lucky to have had a small company that provides excellent broadband service, through line-of-sight signal beamed from a central server on a nearby mountaintop. We serve as a local hub for the houses in our little community. 

But that company had to sell out to a larger company in Asheville because of competition from the electric coop in our area, which recently got a major grant from the Federal government to supply fiber optic Internet service to rural households. Ironically, that slowed expansion of service to new areas of the county WAY DOWN, not coincidentally because the company doing the installation is owned by a relative of the man in charge of the coop. We are in no hurry to be added to the coop’s expansion list. We’ll stick with what we have, thank you.

So, a lot of rural kids can’t do their homework online; a lot of rural folk can’t get Netflix or Prime Video or free online tours of the National Parks or museums. They’re stuck doing what rural folk have always done: farming, gardening, playing music on the porch, riding horses, playing in the creek.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that Netflix and Prime Video don’t come for free, either. Poor families, no matter where they are, can’t afford them, especially if they’ve lost their jobs in the coronapocalypse. And anyone who thinks poor inner-city kids have access to computers to do their homework online is fooling themselves.

Finally, I’ve oriented my post to the problems around tech here in the U.S. Multiply those problems when considering the Third World—Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, rural India. Not only do you have a lack of the income and the hardware to access the Internet, you have a lack of electricity at all in many places.

There’s a flaw in the thinking that envisions a rosy tech-dominated future. Repairing that flaw would mean addressing age and class divisions and overcoming the disparities of geography, not only here in our own country, but also worldwide. The tech giants may be geniuses, but those are challenges I’m not sure they are equipped, or willing, to handle.

Cheers, Donna