Dr. Adam Earnheardt: Telecommuting, Watching Comedy
Dr. Adam C. Earnheardt, professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Youngstown State University, is hanging tough. You can read more about him at his website.
What are some ways the COVID-19 outbreak has changed your work life?
My routine, heck all of our routines, have been turned upside down. So, like many of us, I’m reinventing my job, testing the telecommuter-like life, and seeing what works in terms of productivity. This often means trying out new spaces around the home to be away from my wife and kids so that I can concentrate, make calls and do video conferences, teach and grade, and do all those mundane administrative tasks that I took for granted just a few weeks ago. This is what I know for sure: the stuff that seemed so boring in February now has new life in late-March. I’m actually a little more excited to review and approve expense reports and purchase orders. Wow, never thought I’d type those words.
Of all these changes, the biggest has been moving all YSU courses online in a short amount of time. That was tough. I played a very small role over the last few weeks to help some instructors (those who would otherwise never teach a course online) move all of their classes to Blackboard and other learning platforms. We did this in less than 2 weeks. It usually takes months to create a course online, so there will undoubtedly be bumps along the way as we finish the second half of the Spring semester. This is the new normal. It seems like it would be chaos, and it many ways it was, but we have really amazing, caring faculty and administrators at YSU who want to see everyone succeed—not just the students, but those who have been thrust into this new way of teaching. This whole mess has forced many of us to rethink how we teach, to learn new technologies, and identify new ways to connect with our students on a human level, albeit from 6-feet or more away.
How about your personal life?
For starters, there’s been a lot more take-out and delivery. You don’t realize how much you eat out as a family until you’re forced to order all of that food to eat at home. Seriously, Door Dash and all the amazing delivery people braving the elements have been just as important to Earnheardt meal time as the people taking the orders and working the kitchens in places like Wendy’s, El Jalapeno, Chad Anthony’s, Pizza Joe’s and the seemingly endless list of restaurants where we normally sit and eat. We know we’ll be back sitting in their restaurants soon, but it’s comforting to have their food in our home if we can’t be there in person.
The other change is homeschooling. My wife and I are college professors. We’re not (with an emphasis on “not”) K-12 teachers. Those people are special humans. Like many others, we’re trying our best to teach 4 kids, but it’s not easy. Thankfully the teachers are just as available to our children as my wife and I have tried to be for the students in our YSU classes. As I’ve observed my 7- and 9-year-old sit through Zoom video sessions, I’ve already picked up on some amazing tricks these teachers use to connect with and control their classrooms. Now I’m just hoping to translate some of that control into our homeschool sessions. Fingers crossed.
What steps are you taking to hang tough?
Finding new ways to balance work and play. Working outside when we can (not as often as we like thanks to our unpredictable northeast Ohio weather). Some comfort food coupled with some exercise. TV with lots of comedy. My wife and I just found Letterkenny on Hulu. If you’re in to crass, foul mouth, South Park-type humor, I highly recommend. It makes us laugh, and quite frankly, we need to laugh a lot these days. Other than that, we’re hanging tough by relying on our loved ones. I’m not going to lie, we bicker from time-to-time, but we mostly get along. And that’s saying a lot considering we’re together under the same roof all day long.
What advice are you sharing with the people you love?
Gosh, it feels so cliché to say “stay at home” and “practice social distancing.” Everyone is offering this advice, and rightly so. So my advice is a little different and only meant to complement the shelter-in-place recommendations.
Try something new. If you’re not a first responder or a health care worker right now, you might be cooped up at home a lot longer than expected. This is probably your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try something new. Try a new social media platform (I know, that’s rich coming from the “social media” guy), download a new social game to your mobile device (I’ve rediscovered some old favorites like Trivia Crack and Scrabble), write a journal or blog about your pandemic experience, challenge yourself to be better, to be stronger, and to do things differently to make your life and the lives of those around you a bit better. Who knows? Some of those more positive life changes might stick when our worlds are back to normal.