Vulnerability in Teaching: A Note About the Mental Health of Students

Image courtesy of andros1234 via Pixabay; I miss seeing my students work together on assignments in this face-to-face type of setting

Many universities across the United States, including my home the University of Tennessee, have shortened their semesters as part of an ongoing effort to combat the coronavirus. The reasoning was that cutting out mid-semester breaks would greatly reduce the amount of travel that occurs during the semester. While this is true in theory, many students rely on those breaks to well, take a break and recharge. How else could they be called breaks?

Anyway, it is evident that the coronavirus has taken a toll on the mental health of many people due to the community as a whole feeling more isolated. Society has come to treat interpersonal interaction as fuel, and when you suddenly take that away, well, people just don’t always feel like themselves. Zoom might be a wonderful innovation that has revitalized the feasibility of workplace interaction (and education), but it isn’t quite the same as meeting in a physical room together and discussing things.

As you might be aware if you’ve read some of my other work, I am a Graduate Teaching Associate in the Mathematics Department at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and I am teaching two sections of a course entitled Mathematical Reasoning. One of my many responsibilities in this role is to answer emails from my students in a timely fashion. Typically these…