School’s (almost) out for summer

Albert reflects on a year of hybrid teaching; Michelle shares an unfinished humor piece that she never submitted to McSweeney’s.

Hello everyone!

We hope you enjoyed our last series of interviews. We thought we’d take this week to slow down and do some end-of-semester stock-taking. As always, please don’t be shy about writing us at ampleroad@substack.com.

Albert

We finished our last class on Tuesday; all that’s left are exams and grading. This entire semester, out of the university’s deference to French government restrictions on indoor gatherings and to students who had decided to stay in the U.S., we’ve been “hybrid” teaching: for any given session, half the class is remote and the other half physically present in the classroom. In practice, my classrooms have been mostly empty. (Michelle disputes this, saying hers were half full, but then she’s definitely more popular.) So for most of the semester I showed up at 9 a.m. to find one or two students in a large room, in a building devoid of the foot traffic and hustle and bustle that ordinarily characterizes a semester.

Michelle and I aren’t fans of hybrid teachin…