Science

More Flu Measures

The administration are people too. I just want to start off saying that. However, in this case, I just don’t get it. The more I think about it, the less I get it. Here is the plan our administration came up with. Faculty will report class absences for every Tuesday and Wednesday course. Absence reports […]

The administration are people too. I just want to start off saying that. However, in this case, I just don't get it. The more I think about it, the less I get it.

Here is the plan our administration came up with. Faculty will report class absences for every Tuesday and Wednesday course. Absence reports are due online by Friday. I guess the goal here is to try to monitor the health of the student population and see if we have a flu outbreak or something. Here are the first problems I thought of:

  • Won't there be some type of attendance noise anyway? Maybe attendance goes up and down because of tests and football games and stuff like that. We have not been taking attendance, so we have no idea what this looks like. (actually we take attendance, but we don't really report it)
  • We will just report how many students are absent. It would be much more useful to know WHICH students are absent. What if Billy comes to my class but skips someone else's? I guess this will all kind of fall into noise, but still.
  • The report is due Friday. If you want to make a quick decision, isn't this 2 day delay a big deal?

I think it would be better if students reported themselves online as having flu-like symptoms. Wouldn't that be easier?

Then I thought of something else. What are the administration going to do if there is a flu outbreak? Cancel class to prevent spreading? I think if they do that, it would have to be like for 2 weeks or something. You can't just cancel 2 weeks of class. I mean, we only missed 1 week of class for hurricane Katrina. Two weeks is a pretty big deal.

The time delay thing is still bothering me. This combined with the only action being extremely severe makes me think that if the administration were driving a car, they would come up with this plan:

Ok. If we see the airbag go off, we will know we need to hit the brakes.

If it gets so bad that we have to do something, it will be obvious (to me). Maybe this attendance plan is just something to do to make it look like they are doing something. Just like TSA makes you take off your shoes before getting on an airplane.

I guess I should stop blogging and get those absences reported online. Although...I do have until Friday night to do it.