Sheffield:
I am an assistant professor at the University of South Florida.
Charbonneau:
How long have you been at the University of South Florida?
Sheffield:
I have been at South Florida for just under five years and I have been a
tenure track faculty member for about 3.
Charbonneau:
What courses and programs are you affiliated with or what you normally
teach?
Sheffield:
I teach geoscience courses, so I teach paleontology, sedimentary
petrology, history of life, Earth sciences, and graduate courses in
paleobiology.
Charbonneau:
During the pandemic how long were you remote for before you switched it
to blending learning or having the students back in the classroom?
Sheffield:
We went fully remote right at the heart of the pandemic. It was a weird
time because my schedule had shifted right before because I had had
unexpected surgery. I was not teaching when it started.
I was out, but my partner was teaching the class that I was supposed to
be teaching, sedimentary petrology. He is not a petrologist or
sedimentary geologist, any shape, way, or form. He was learning right
along. I was helping him get the videos up and making the recordings
because it was just chaos.
I had ankle surgery, so I was already housebound for months before the
pandemic. Soon as I got off bed rest, it was like: “Oh, you cannot leave
anyway. Never mind.” It was chaotic, but we stayed virtual.
We were given the choice to return to in person learning quickly into
the fall semester, though we were for that year in fall 2020, and then
spring 2021, we were allowed to teach it more hybrid. The rule was we
had to have nine in person hours, but the rest could be online. Most of
us took that choice in the geoscience department. Most of us were
teaching online as much as possible, including myself. I had a lab
course for paleontology both that year and in spring 2021. I was
teaching online with optional in person lab days should students need
it, but most everybody was just online.
Charbonneau:
At what point were back to like businesses usual where you transitioned
back to your routine in person?
Sheffield:
Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, I was comfortable with teaching online
because of the pandemic is still very much prevalent but that was no
longer a choice.
It was like a strange ball that got rolling. This is off topic, I am
sorry, but one of our faculty left the department quickly and so I took
over their classes with extraordinarily little notice that fall. Then,
when I was like: “OK look, my doctors let me know December that I have
got to have ankle surgery. Listen, I have already fulfilled my course
requirements for the year. What can we do?” My department had found
somebody to adjunct. So, it was just like once that ball got rolling,
chaos was going in every single direction for a little bit. But I was
lucky, because I do not think I could have handled the multiple times a
week physical therapy surgery, doctor's appointments, and teaching
online at that time more than I did. But as I said, I was helping get
lectures recorded and transcriptions made and things like that. I wrote
the sedimentary petrology lectures that someone was teaching from.
Charbonneau:
What learning platforms and modes of media were you using for those
recordings and to give assignments to your students?
Sheffield:
We were using Canvas and YouTube heavily, and a lot of Google Docs and
things like that for different assignments.
Charbonneau:
What did you do for laboratory sections and field work?
Sheffield:
My surgery influenced the field work part of it and the reason was that
I had injured myself a couple of years before and doctors were not sure
how to fix it. I was unable to do field work for a while leading up to
the pandemic. I was trying to shift my view of accepting that I was not
going to be a field geologist anymore for a while.
I love field trips with students. It is a blast. But I could not do it.
I could not risk bringing myself into the field with students and then
becoming a risk, because what if I injured myself worse or something
like that? What if I could not drive the van home because my ankle was
not working? I did some virtual field trips where we were looking at
different things. I just said: “You know what? We cannot. I cannot do
this anyway. So why am I stressing about how to get this?” We do other
things. We did a lot of virtual field trips, a lot of looking at giga
pan images and zooming in and out to see the scale of things.
For labs, my TA bless his soul, and I begged different fossil clubs for
samples, and we went out to the beach social distanced to collect
shells. After a while, I got a couple of friends to help, and we made
these fossil kits that are just magnificent, and we shipped them to
everybody that could not get them. We handed them out or we mailed them
to people if they were too far or to get to campus and did that for
labs. We sent calipers with them. They were doing studies on the
specimens. They were looking at taphonomy, how things were breaking
down.
Everybody had a different kit, so they all got to share their answers
with each other because they all had quite varied reasons for their
answers. I met somebody from the Tampa Bay Fossil Club in the back of at
KFC parking lot, and we just opened their trunk and there were just like
boxes of horse teeth in there for me. I was incredibly lucky to have
folks that were looking out for educators.
Charbonneau:
What is your plan of how you will conduct your curriculum and lessons
when you return?
Sheffield:
I have kept the virtual learning. Now, we are in person. People are in
my classrooms every day. But I really like the YouTube video structure.
Students watch the YouTube video. I made hours of these videos and
cannot imagine getting rid of all this work done. But I also noticed
students were asking better questions when they were watching the videos
and then coming to class, I structured these assignments that are
related to the lecture, but it is more just putting things into
practice. OK, you learned about onto genetics, let us do a gross study.
I was not asking them to regurgitate anything, just use the skills. I
noticed that they were really asking better questions even online, which
you know I was grateful for because otherwise that class would been
difficult, so we ended up keeping it. Now we just do the assignment
parts in class. It is more of a flipped classroom. I am still editing it
because it is not as interactive is I would like. Students were still
struggling to get them to open and talk to one another, which I think
might be a side effect of things because I am now getting the students
who started their geology courses in the pandemic.
The first year or two I had students who already knew each other, so
classes even online, the classes were like the fun kind of chaos of
everybody talking to each other, which is what I want to see. Now it is
more begging [to interact].
Charbonneau:
Do they have a requirement that you have to do so many like physical
field trips or field work components for your program?
Sheffield:
For my program, yes. For my class, no. Honestly, my ankle changed a lot.
I am planning to add a field trip that will be accessible for anyone, I
would say I will be making sure that that is accounted for. Taking some
field trips to look for sharks’ teeth and things like that in Florida.
It will be a local field trip for sure. It will not be overnight and
that will depend on what the world looks like come August.
Charbonneau:
What COVID restrictions are going to be in place at your institution
when you return?
Sheffield:
I am in Florida so I can wear a mask and I can say that masking reduces
transmission, so it might be a clever idea. Last semester my students
were all great about wearing masks. My mom was living with me. She is
elevated risk.
I just explained to my students like: “Hey listen, my mom is living with
me. She is elevated risk. That means anything happens like it could be
bad. So, I will be wearing a mask. I really hope that I can count on you
to listen to the science.” My students are scientists, and they knew the
risks, and they understood them. They were great about not coming to
class if they were sick. We always had Teams on. If you were sick, you
had the choice of just attending [virtually] no matter what.
Which worked well. Anyway, that is important for accessibility, so
students never felt they had to sacrifice to get to class in person. But
hopefully I imagine many of my students will have the same mindset come
fall. But I will be masking up.
Charbonneau:
What level of virtual integration do you plan to keep in your
curriculum?
Sheffield:
We are going to add in some more in person components. Some of the ideas
I have now are things like, students have a fossil of the day where they
get to present their favorite fossil or something like that. Just to get
them talking more. But we will see. But I am keeping videos and they are
supposed to watch the lecture videos before class. Class times are 75
minutes. They are supposed to be there working on the assignments, and
they can do that either in person or virtually. That said, we have high
flexibility. My philosophy is if you need to miss class, just tell me
beforehand, the reasons are not really that important to me.
Everybody has lives. Everybody has things happening at the last minute.
Just send me an e-mail. I usually find that if you trust students right
up front, then they are not going to lie to you. They will trust you
right back to take their issues seriously and respect their time. The
lab is the only part that I absolutely have a hard ‘you must be here if
you can’. Obviously with exceptions of course, but that is mostly
because the labs are built to be students working with someone else. You
are collecting data with someone else, and that gets hard to do
asynchronously.
Charbonneau:
What did you notice happened to student recruitment and retention? How
did that evolve or change at your school?
Sheffield:
We have lost students. Last I checked USF, it tracked similarly to where
other universities were with losing students. The Geoscience Department,
which is the school geosciences where I am, is a geology, geography, and
environmental science departments. It is large. But we have also had a
tough time keeping and recruiting students.
Geology is often a discovery major. It has been a little bit harder to
get students into these experiences because I feel like it can be more
difficult to make those one-on-one connections with professors and
students online. It can feel impersonal. I do my best to ensure students
did not feel that way, but obviously they are still going to. I am a
square talking to them on a screen.
It did hurt us in recruitment and retention, and I know it was it was
difficult for students. USF has many working students, returning
students, families, and veterans. It is a beautiful place with students
from every background. But that did also mean that students had to make
decisions that were difficult, like withdrawing and getting a more
stable job during this time of economic and uncertainty. Is always tough
to see, but understandable of course.
Charbonneau:
What strategies are you implementing to help kind of ease students back
in and get those retention and recruitment rates back to what they were
prior to the pandemic?
Sheffield:
We have been having some meetings about department community. That is
really the part about geology that I love the most, is that every
department I have been too has such a strong community feel. We are all
going out on weekends looking for rocks and things like that. Our
students have board game nights all the time. The department will drive
more of those community-oriented events. I hope that will start to pull
some students in.
Charbonneau:
What did you notice happened to the number of staff and faculty at your
institution?
Sheffield:
I do not know that we really saw a change. We also have not been hiring
too many folks lately. I was hired three years ago. We have only had one
other search in those three years. We really have not hired too many
folks. There was one extra retirement that happened and that was pretty
much when things were bad with COVID as well.
There is more uncertainty and things like that in the university was
asking: “Hey listen, if you want to retire, let us help make this
happen.” Just before that they were saving resources where they needed
it. Otherwise, we did not really have any changes that I would say would
have happened because of COVID.
Staff turnover did not really have like a noticeable change.
We have no restrictions on travel side of things. Unless the CDC
(Centers for Disease Control) offers special travel warnings or safety
warnings, the typical ones that were in place before the pandemic ever
started. Otherwise, we have no restrictions. Those restrictions ended
early on, six months into the pandemic, a little bit later, but you
could still get permission to go if there were restrictions.
I traveled for the first time in June of 2021 and there were no
restrictions at that time. I have not traveled a lot because I still be
careful. No international travel, especially just to make sure that I am
not doing anything that would harm someone else.
Charbonneau:
Did your departmental budget change during the pandemic?
Sheffield:
There have been some shifts. Some budgets have been a little bit
tighter. Some budgets have been a little more flexible. For example, we
have not brought in speakers for our weekly seminar colloquium. We have
had more room in the budget to do things because we have not been able
to buy plane tickets and hotels for folks coming in or we have not been
taking students out to lunch to meet with the speakers. Sometimes that
money has been a little bit more flexible. The university also has not
been distributing as much as well, so it is kind of been haphazard.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice there were any skill gaps the students had from the
pandemic?
Sheffield:
There were some. Some of it was time management and self-management.
Those were big ones. We were struggling when we came back. I noticed
that all of us were just exhausted by social interaction. I had to
adjust some things in the classroom to just help alleviate that. Have
smaller pieces of it so we were not all just getting completely
overwhelmed at once.
I am a very flexible instructor, but we had hard deadlines to help
students manage their time. Those deadlines can always be shifted if you
need. But being too flexible was almost hurting the students because it
was just extremely hard for them to figure out how do I prioritize X, Y,
and Z? How do I manage the different expectations? In college,
professors are all quite different. How I structure my classroom is
quite different from this other person's structure and their classroom.
Everyone had different rules. Everyone had different learning styles,
like how they were presenting the information. It was overwhelming for
students.
Usually somebody talks to you for 75 minutes, then you go. Now it was
OK, this person wants me to watch a YouTube video. This person wants me
to do this beforehand. This person wants me to read this. The class
could look different depending on which class I am going to this day. It
was difficult for them. I think most of it was just helping them adjust
to the differences and getting them to adjust to the expectations that
each professor had. Students were engaged and excited to learn. They
were excited to be back because a lot of them really struggled with
learning online, which I get.
Skills wise, students always come in with a different skill set no
matter what, so I do not notice anything specifically. It took some of
them a little bit more time to get back to learning independently, more
so during the pandemic- it was easier to ask for help. We were all
helping each other. Once we came back into the classroom, it took
students some time to be feel comfortable again with being wrong and
making errors when they were learning. This is something I prioritize.
It is OK to be wrong. It is OK to make mistakes. Let us work on this and
redo it. But I noticed was difficult for students like they were
terrified to be wrong.
I buy that change. It was because they did not feel they could ask as
much or they were not finding their professors as like available to
reach out and say: “Hey, what is going on?” “What is this error message
for.”? That took some time and hopefully it is getting better.
Charbonneau:
Were there certain strategies you implemented to try to help with these
issues?
Sheffield:
I know that they had some workshops on management and time management.
Though I do not know how many students took those. They were also aimed
to faculty and staff, so I do not know. I did not go to any. I was
unfortunately ironically always too busy in meetings to go to my
management ones.
I know that we have a student referral system. It is called the
“Students of Concern Action Team,” and I know they just changed their
name, but I do not remember what to. I can e-mail them and say: “Hey,
listen, this student’s struggling,” and they will reach out quickly.
This has been a good thing for me at USF because it is not just their
mental health. It could be listened, this student is talking about
dropping out because they do not have money, or this student was just
diagnosed with cancer. Then they need to make accommodations, which
happened in my classrooms.
USF, the action team, will go in. They will talk to the student, and
they will make an individualized plan. Like here, we have some
scholarship money in this area, we see that you have these experiences,
we can give you a scholarship or, here let us work out a payment plan
for tuition, or here let us get you set-up with a social worker or help.
You deal with the new medical issues going on. Let us help you. It has
been helpful because they personalize it.
Which I find has been more successful because a lot of the times you are
just dealing with: “Oh here, go to the counseling center.” That is
great. We need that for the students. Absolutely. But sometimes it is
not a one-size-fits-all solution. What might be driving the mental
health is I cannot afford to eat. Let us get you to a food pantry. Or I
cannot afford my apartment, let us find you some housing resources. That
has been helpful. I have been using that resource since I got here, but
even more so during the pandemic.
Charbonneau:
What is the core like geoscience professional skills you want students
to have after they complete your courses specifically?
Sheffield:
The biggest skills I teach are in the scientific method, so
understanding what a hypothesis is and how to test them. What we can and
cannot say in science? Like, why? Why can you not say? Students should
take away that understanding how science works and beyond that, I
usually focus more on skills versus knowledge. I do not stress a lot of
memorizations outside of geologic timescale and important things like
that. Students do a lot of Excel, statistics, science communication,
writing, and oral work. My students will do things like they will write
blog posts for a geology blog. They do a lot of stuff like that where
their work is highlighted publicly so they can use it and put it on a
resume. I hope a lot of my lecture and like these went through the AGI
(American Geosciences Institute) list of skills that everybody
[employers] wants, which was super helpful. I am very appreciative of
that.
Charbonneau:
Did USF make any accommodations to help push students along during the
pandemic?
Sheffield:
I did not do this specifically in geology because we moved all the camps
online. Students had to take [field] camp online. But the
environmental science majors did in our departments, they have a
mandatory internship that they must do. Of course, a lot of these
internships were cancelled on the fly. All the faculty and the
Geosciences Department had to help find projects for students to do
quickly to get that internship credit counted. A lot of students had to
shift. I took in a couple of students where instead of doing their
environmental science internship they worked with me on scientific
ratings.
I had them write several summaries of recently published peer reviewed
articles to put on the blog that I write for a lot. I worked with them
on clarity, communication, breaking jargon down and things like that. We
had to do those kinds of shifts. I know other students were collecting
data for other faculty. The whole gamut of things. Whatever we could
find to help you know, it was 40 students or something.
The degree requirement has stayed consistent; however, we have made a
shift towards at least one of our field camps being virtual. I do not
know for sure, but it seems like it might be a permanent one and I
really appreciate this. It is moving more into the choice between field
camp and data camp. Our field camps are run nontraditionally. Instead of
the 6-week chunk, we make you take three different two-week chunks.
There are five or six of them, and students can take a range of them.
That means that they do not have to take six weeks of field work. They
can do two weeks of data and four weeks of field work or things like
that. One of them has stayed data-driven and is primarily virtual. I
would love to see this culture shift that gets us away from this model
of finding what student can take six weeks off their job, what parents
take six weeks away from their kids. Nobody can do this. Our students
are having to quit their jobs to go to field camp. We do not have the
student population that can do that. We should not expect it either, no
matter what. We made some changes, and I hope the philosophy of how our
field camps are being run is that we see more of that. It will be
important for equity moving forward.
Charbonneau:
Were you doing any of your own research during the pandemic?
Sheffield:
I was right before the pandemic. I was planning to take a trip to France
and to Sweden to do field work and museum work over the summer. I was
thinking, OK, late summer I should be back on my feet. I should be good.
I already made plans. I had gotten a grant to do this. I was so excited.
Obviously, those trips had not happened yet. I was writing a review
paper, but like the month before the pandemic started, I started writing
one, and that ended up being important because it did not require
traveling, which was good. The important thing that during the pandemic
that is really shifted a lot of my research is how I have been
collaborating with folks.
For example, one of my great friends in graduate school is now a
collections manager at the University of Michigan Museum. I was
struggling because I now have students who do not have internship
experience. They do not have a lot of research experience. They do not
have a lot of field work under their belt because of the pandemic. What
do we do to help them? How do we get them those resume things? How do I
get new research? It was a struggle.
Some of the things we did was Jen, the person I was working with, she
started making 3D models of specimens. We started doing research off the
3D models, so it was a great system for her because she was getting the
research she needed out of the specimens in her collection, and I was
getting more research and students involved. She and I have now gotten
out three different abstracts with students, and we have a paper
underway. [It was all virtual] up until last week, I went to Michigan
to finish the few things we needed to see in person.
We did all this without stepping foot in a museum and leaving my lab, so
that was good. It has been helpful to see how we can continue collecting
data. I also had students doing a lot of literature-based searching for
things like biogeography studies. Collecting where the specimens are
from and the ages that they are from. A lot of stratigraphy searching
and things like that. I am sure the students were just delighted by
reading these papers from the 1800s.
They never complained to me [joke], but we did a lot of those kinds of
studies too, where we could just go online and do a lot of that studying
to then run different models of biogeography. We have shifted to doing a
lot of what we can without leaving our houses, because all of that can
be done from the student's homes too. Nobody had to leave.
It works great. There are these brachiopods from the Silica Shale, which
is Devonian. They have these communities of stuff growing out. Other
brachiopods, trilobites. It is wild. They are gorgeous specimens. The
student I have is looking at how the organisms growing on it have
affected the morphology of the shell. Has it changed the morphology of
the shell? Have they changed how the brachiopod can grow? We can do all
this from 3D models. It has been great.
I do not want to, you know, downplay anything about the pandemic and it
is severity. But when I got started at USF, I was an instructor, a
visiting instructor. I was teaching a full load, 6 courses a year,
hundreds upon hundreds of students.
By the time I would finish with making lectures, answering emails,
office hours, my brain was just done, so research was just difficult.
When you are that tired, you cannot do research. You need to have
creative thinking skills left. And I had none. When I transitioned to
tenure track, it was difficult for me to get back into the swing of
producing ideas, getting excited about research, going to two testing
sites, and things like that. It was just so hard to get back into that.
When the pandemic which started three months after I took my job as
tenure track instructor, suddenly it was, you must start thinking of new
things. You must figure out new ways because otherwise you are not able
to publish. You know you need to. You must do it. It really helped. It
also helped me develop. I have had a secondary focus and research coming
in through inclusive education and diversity, equity, and inclusion
strategies. I have now published a couple of papers in that field as
well.
That pivot really helped me too, because it really helped me think about
how my education policies were not as inclusive as they could have been.
Just thinking about how I could be doing better and things like that.
But it also helped me meet new folks on Twitter. I am a big Twitter fan,
like getting tips from other faculty, talking about research. and things
like sharing photos. Of course, the professional aspects. I met a group
of folks on Twitter, and we ended up authoring a paper together. I have
still never met most of them in person.
The paper put in Nature Communications on antiracism was written because
of the incidents coming from 2020. Working virtually really forced me to
find new avenues which has helped me overall.
Charbonneau:
Do you see these as something that is just going to be a temporary fix
for now or do you think this is something now that you have been exposed
to it is going to be more of a permanent resource you like use as a
touchstone moving forward?
Sheffield:
It is going to be more of a permanent resource because I have really
developed good working patterns with writing on Zoom together. It has
been super beneficial for me. The adult supervision of looking up and
saying: “Oh, God, they are going to judge me if I get on social media
right now. I better keep working.” That is helpful.
But that has been super helpful. It has also been helpful because my
carbon footprint is down. I am not a fan of these like short trips
across the country to look at 1 fossil and then come back. We are not
practicing what we preach as scientists about climate change and
reducing our impact. That has been beneficial too.
It is also opening things up. These 3D models that we made for this
project can now be accessed by anybody in the world, which means that
folks who cannot physically get to Michigan for whatever reason, whether
it be visa issues, or inability to travel for disability, or parental
care or other care giving relationships, they can now get to them. This
really should be something that we continue. I do not want to make light
of the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic has been it destructive to
folks. I will not say that I am happy this happened.
It has made a lot of things more difficult. My colleagues are slower
getting drafts out because we are all completely stressed out from the
extra teaching loads, the extra emotional loads, from working with
students who are struggling with their mental health and with their
emotional health. Grant proposals have been slower because reviewers are
slower. Everything has been more difficult, and it is making tenure
track, post doc, and senior graduate students, all of it is getting more
precarious.
I know we would all like to think that it is getting better, but a lot
of it is not. Much of it is still terribly slow because many folks are
still dealing with a lot. The pandemic is still very much going on with
everything else that the past couple of years have thrown at us.
I think that, like some parts of it, has given me some opportunities to
expand and grow to who I am as a researcher and an educator in general.
I had a support system before this happened of people that I work with
heavily, so I can imagine for somebody who is just transitioning in who
may not have had that support system already built. I cannot imagine how
they have been doing things. I also am speaking from a place of
privilege to have those support systems. I work with a group of other
tenure track women who read everything I write, who do research with me
regularly. Without that support system, I think it would have been a lot
more difficult.
Charbonneau:
What new opportunities did you feel became available to you the during
the pandemic?
Sheffield:
Changing my access to how I communicated with collaborators is helpful.
E-mail and things like that were great, but it was slower. I feel like
now I have more of an opportunity to work with folks’ kind of face to
face, which is more helpful for me in general, E-mails and phone calls
are not the best ways that I communicate. It has been nice to have that
face-to-face communication [virtually], to talk to folks.
I have the same love hate relationship that I assume that everyone does.
It has been great to see that even things like having the closed
captions on over phone calls, it is nice to have flexibility and
accessibility.
It has helped me too because I cannot do field work. It has been helpful
for me because we need to change this about the culture of geology. Full
stop. But not being able to do field work for me was difficult. It was
hard. I kept beating myself up for it, which is not fair. It was an
injury; it was a disability. I couldn’t do anything about it, but I felt
like less of a geologist. Suddenly, I was like, "Why is my relationship
to geology based on this one thing?" but we really push that in the
culture of geology.
Taking away the field work almost helped me a little bit. Reframe how I
am thinking. A lot of other folks are like, “OK, how can I move away
from field work too to expand what I am doing and have field work and
other opportunities?” I think that will be helpful not just for me, but
for lots of folks.
Charbonneau:
What would be a piece of advice you would give to yourself or somebody
in an analogous situation?
Sheffield:
Buy stock in Zoom. No, kidding. It was difficult. I did not really
mention this, I did briefly, but my mom lived with us. A couple of
months after the pandemic started my mom ended up having to have major
surgery in October. Luckily, I was still teaching online so I could pack
up and move to North Carolina for about a month to take her for that.
She was not ready to be on her own, so I took her back to live with me
for six months, which we could not have done if we were teaching in
person. It is not have been safe for her to be near us. My partner also
teaches classes, and he has typical classes of like 200, so it would not
have been safe.
I do have a point, I promise. I was then suddenly teaching remotely. I
was working from my mom's kitchen table in North Carolina. My mom does
not have great Wi-Fi, and here I am trying to make YouTube videos where,
every five minutes my mom's is like: “Sarah. What do you think about
this thing on the news?” and I am on like my 7th take of my lecture. I
am like: “Mom, I am teaching class,” and she is like: “OK, can you give
me some lunch?” [laughing]
It was really isolating and my product-, unbelievably [joke], my
productivity tanked that year. Between me [my surgery], the pandemic,
and my mom’s surgery, I wish that if I could go back [to say something
to myself], I would have. I was really stressed about staying up late,
worrying about like: “You are clearly going to blow your tenure like you
cannot do this.” You know, you can’t do all of this.
I really wish that I had gone back and just said: “You know what, you
really must give yourself some grace. Just stop worrying. You cannot
control this. You were doing the best you can.” I wish that I had said:
“You know what, you made the decision to prioritize your family, and
that was the correct decision.”
If I could go back in time, I would have told myself: visit your family
before this starts because I did not get to see my niece and nephew for
almost 2 years. I didn’t get to see my sister for over a year and that
was difficult for sure. I did not get to see my brother either for a
long time, so I would have said that: Make sure you are cherishing that
time with your mom, because we are still under a lot of stress. Having
the opportunity while teaching to be able to go live with her, which
that could not have happened during a normal semester, not easily. It
was a blessing in disguise of sorts. If you want to put it that way, to
be able to pack up and go. I wish I had just said, take a deep breath.
You are doing the best you can.
Charbonneau:
What is your biggest like take away in terms of being adaptable to those
challenges?
Sheffield:
That is a good question. I think part of it is just reminding myself
that you must be adaptable. While I was struggling to fight it, I had to
tell myself that the museums are shut down, they are not mailing you
things, you cannot do anything.
This is the time where that we were using Clorox on cereal boxes. This
is early in the pandemic phase, but oh my God, what a time. But I think
reminding myself repeatedly that you must be adaptable. Especially when
you are adapting to things that you have absolutely no frame of
reference for. How do you adapt to the fact that going to the grocery
store could harm somebody else if you are not incredibly careful? That
is reminding myself that you must be adaptable. You must be adaptable as
that helps my students. That helps me. It helps my collaborators. It
helps everybody in my circle. Things can’t exist the way that they were.
I think the one thing that like still weighs on me a little bit is
making sure that universities are taking this into consideration across
the board. Especially when equipment was delayed everywhere for months
at a time. It took me 8 months to get a computer because of the computer
chip shortage. I needed [that computer] to run any kind of analysis
that was more than just like databasing.
Or considering the amount of teaching, especially for underrepresented
faculty. I had e-mails piling in by the dozens from students saying: “I
need to talk to somebody right now. Do you have a minute?” Things like
that. They were just piping in every single day. I hope universities are
looking at this and thinking, let us reframe how we evaluate
[faculty]. What we value in our faculty and things like that. It is
not just the number of grants. It is not just the number of papers. We
need to value other things as well because we cannot keep going like
this. We need to start valuing the things that really matter here.
