Had to do a parent move last night. Too much activity for the oldest to get classwork done. I had instill a basic dead week type atmosphere at the house. From 9-12 and 1-3 its quiet time. I also told the son to get his rear end out of bed and do work from 8 am on. Told him its quiet because his siblings are asleep at that time. He went for a run at 8:15 and seems to be following that schedule.
Only one person isn't really following it and its the wife. At least she takes a lot of naps so it will be somewhat decent. At first it looked like a great semester to take 18 credits, now it doesn't look that way. Some of his instructors have nothing up yet so that will get difficult to catch up on maybe.
Here's a glimpse into just one day's chaos (yesterday) with the adjustment:
1. T.A. totally blew off my instructions for a simple assignment. I told him what I wanted, why, and stressed the fact that we're not increasing the workload for people now. So he created instead an essay assignment. I unpublished that, put up the assignment I wanted, and fought that out over e-mail in an uncompromising way. We'll be doing that again.
2. My Internet is wholly insufficient for uploading videos, so I really need to look at how to break things down further, and probably include linked videos more than videos created by me.
3. Phone solution for taping is done. Ran out of memory last night, but didn't know until after recording Part III of the class, so phone went ahead and deleted Part III. Gotta redo that today.
4. Gut feeling from the heat of the phone last night: it neededa break, so I'm uploading much later than planned or desired.
5. I still need to write the revised exam that goes live on Monday.
6. I still need to do an entirely different breakdown of the course material to adapt to the new environment with what I've learned.
7. I'll need to use my laptop for recording. That may or may not work, and equipment isn't available at any reasonable price to make a substitution. Essentially, what i have works or we're SOL as a group for now while I find new, creative ways around the problems.
8. There really isn't time to work around the problems, because we're this late in the semester. It's far from ideal.
All these scenarios from one day in the life of someone who got ahead of the curve in his planning and resourcing, and someone who understands technology.
My understanding of these things tends to be a lot better than my colleagues, and my obsession with planning is a lot greater. For all that, I'm sitting on a ******** right now.
I'm pretty sure that my issues are a pretty small version of what others are facing, and mine are bad. I'll speculate that less than 1% are procrastinating, but none of us really know what we need to do yet to do this well, or even just passably.