For biology teachers, perhaps more than most other educators, these may be the best and worst of times. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruption, death, and despair of a magnitude the nation has not experienced since last century’s world wars or the 1918 influenza pandemic. Teachers themselves have endured personal illness and hospitalization while attempting to teach with various strains of virtual and hybrid instruction all while adapting to frequent shifts in protocols for in-person classrooms. Teachers have weathered these professional demands while coping with their own families’ economic, physical, and emotional hardships. But the content of biology itself has never been so relevant and will very likely prove to be crucial to strengthening our nation’s preparedness for future public health emergencies.
Biology teachers and students are living and breathing the subject of this pandemic. The metrics of contagion and epidemiologic patterns are now household words. Mutations and the emergence...
University of California Press