She Just Wants Her Students to Keep Talking

The first week she taught online, Samantha Elkaim planned a lesson on misinformation: Her students collected coronavirus material from social media and analyzed its trustworthiness and accuracy. The second week, they started research papers. “If the thing you’re most curious about right now is coronavirus, write about it,” she told the class. “If you’re really curious about baseball right now because it’s the thing that’s keeping you from going crazy about coronavirus, write about baseball.” She wound up with roughly a 50-50 split between topics coronavirus-related and not. (One student wanted to write about whether people were going to love technology or hate it when this was all over.) Before the pandemic, Elkaim had been hoping to get to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, but she’s not sure it will happen now.

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