THE OLD WAYS ARE BEST

Well, I did it.  I zoomed my class yesterday.  I can’t say I like that format, although my students were very patient with me.  It just doesn’t seem right to be talking at a computer screen, looking at little box pictures of the students [or their names, if they choose to mute their video – there has got to be another word besides “mute” for that.]  I had trouble with the sound, and my students told me I needed to get a mike headset that plugs into my computer, so I ordered one from Amazon that will be here on Friday.  I will put it under a blanket in my study unopened, and by Monday morning any virus on it should be dead.

One rather nice consequence of this new format:  I find that in philosophy classes the men dominate the discussion and the women, especially undergraduate women, fade into the background, but when they are all little faces on my screen of equal size I can see the women clearly, and their reactions are often more lively than those of the men.

My retirement community has closed the exercise room until further notice so I can no longer do my 4x a week cardio.  I am back to my morning walk and this morning I had a long conversation with myself about the way in which the gig economy completes the ideological mystification of capitalism which Marx brilliantly anatomizes in the opening chapters of Capital.  I thought that later this afternoon, I would lay this out on my blog, in preparation for lecturing about it next Monday.