The global COVID-19 pandemic will soon appear in history and biology textbooks and will eventually be something future generations of students study, along with the Great Depression and the Spanish Flu of 1918. Several Northwood teachers are using the pandemic as a teaching opportunity today, while students are taking classes online as a result of the outbreak. Students in Statistics, Biology, Macroeconomics, Entrepreneurship, and Journalism classes have studied the pandemic from the point-of-view of their respective disciplines.
In Mr. Jeff Miller’s Statistics class, students have used the rapid growth of COVID-19 cases in the United States as a way to study exponential and logistic growth and linear regression:
Ms. Jill Walker has also been teaching how easily the virus can spread and who will most likely suffer the most from the disease in her Human Biology class. According to Ms. Walker, the virus can change so often that when the doctors and scientists come up with a cure, it may not last very long because the virus can mutate.
Dr. Laura Finnerty Paul teaches Entrepreneurship and Macroeconomics, and both classes have been including the virus in their studies. Zachary Ellsworth ’20, who is in Macroeconomics, said, “We’ve been discussing government’s stimulus package, looking at how the government is using expansionary fiscal and monetary policies in an effort to pump the economy back up. Although what’s happening right now is horrible, it’s nice to be able to apply Macroeconomics to understand what is going on in the world.” Meanwhile, Entrepreneurship has been studying about what the virus has done to education systems around the world and how life will go back to normal after the pandemic. As a student in Entrepreneurship, I’ve been talking to other classmates and reading articles online, which has helped me realize that the virus is promoting online learning and that this change has been hard not only on students but on teachers.
Of course, Northwood’s journalism class and The Mirror has been chronicling Northwood’s response to the pandemic by publishing articles that explore life from a student’s perspective.
Despite the uncertainty, the students and faculty of Northwood have been making the most of their online classes through useful discussions about COVID-19, which has been changing the world day by day.
