Philip Gressman:

We knew, right? It was easy to see that if there was going to be a problem, that it was going to be a big problem.

Caroline Watts:

We learned a lot about how to initiate and sustain and grow relationships through virtual technology last year. And we learned that in some cases, making connections actually was easier for some people based on their comfort level with what they were engaging in, while at the same time, there were compromises that I think we all feel that we'll never get back, experiences we'll never get back.

Philip Gressman:

It really makes you think a lot about, "Well, how do we carry on in a way that can foster learning and also be more fair to the students," recognizing that the playing field that we tried to level as much as possible was just pulled right out from under us, and the students were all in their own unique circumstances for the last year.

Caroline Watts:

Zoom life gave us a window into people's personal spaces that, at times, felt intrusive and not comfortable or necessarily appropriate but taught us a lot if we were willing to look, and that is information we should really hold on to.

Brandon Baker:

Welcome to Understand This, a Penn Today podcast with the University of Pennsylvania. With an eye toward the interdisciplinary, we invite guests from different backgrounds to address shared problems of our time.

Brandon Baker:

I'm Brandon Baker, your host and staff writer in the Office of University Communications. In today's episode, we discuss the long-awaited return to the classroom and reflect on a year and a half of learning during a pandemic. Because when the COVID-19 pandemic upended life as we knew it, it also appended education as we knew it. Classes, as students and educators alike will recall, were quickly adapted for remote learning to meet the moment, to swiftly shuffle students and faculty to safety while carrying on with the academic mission. And while that transition has been met with a broad mix of feedback, the so-called new normal so begs for flexibility.

Brandon Baker:

It's a moment of great celebration as we return to the classroom, but also of yet more adjustment because the classroom, as we knew it, has been irrevocably changed, not just by the anxiety that comes with in-person environments, but by the lessons taken from an unexpected experiment in using digital tools to meet the needs of learning. Case in point, gone are the days when anyone raised an eyebrow of the concepts of synchronous and asynchronous learning.

Brandon Baker:

Here, in the first episode of Understand This for the 20 21-2022 academic year, and yes, the first we've been fortunate enough to record in-person with all precautions in place, we'll explore what the return to the classroom will look like, but also examine where we've been, what we've learned along the way, and what we're genuinely looking forward to about being reunited.

Brandon Baker:

Joining in today's discussion is Caroline Watts, a senior lecturer in the Graduate School of Education and Director of School and Community Engagement. She's currently applying her background in counseling, human development, and quantitative methods to a Project for Progress, preparing students in summer schools in West and Southwest Philadelphia for a return to the classroom.

Brandon Baker:

Also in the conversation is Philip Gressman, a professor of mathematics in the School of Arts and Sciences who worked quickly at the onset of the pandemic to translate mathematics education for a virtual environment.

Brandon Baker:

We'll discuss their experiences as educators during the pandemic, what they've learned, and what's next.

Brandon Baker:

Well, welcome to the podcast, everyone. How's everyone doing this rainy morning? We're about a week out from the semester.

Philip Gressman:

Good.

Caroline Watts:

Getting ready.

Brandon Baker:

Glad to hear it.

Brandon Baker:

So I think it'd be best to start with some introductions. So Caroline, why don't you go first and tell us a little bit about your history here at Penn and what you work on.

Caroline Watts:

Great. My name's Caroline Watts. I'm the Director of School and Community Engagement for the Graduate School of Education here at Penn, and I've been here for 13 years. In addition to my work in the community, I am an instructor in the Advanced Internship program in the Professional Counseling program. So I work with our master's students who are training to be school and mental health counselors in school and community settings around the city.

Caroline Watts:

But I spend the large part of my time facilitating our relationships with Philadelphia schools and community organizations so that Penn GSE can have sustained and demonstrable impact on the lives of kids and families through our connections to community schools and neighborhoods and agencies.

Brandon Baker:

Thank you.

Brandon Baker:

Philip?

Philip Gressman:

My name is Phil Gressman, and I'm a professor and Undergraduate Chair of the Mathematics department. I've been also at Penn for 13 years, study the area of mathematics and its harmonic analysis which it doesn't have much to do with COVID, necessarily, but [inaudible 00:04:59] some interesting connections. It's been an interesting 18 months, research-wise and personally.

Brandon Baker:

I think we're all suddenly in the situation of being connected to COVID, whether we like it or not.

Brandon Baker:

Great. So I guess I want to start by talking a little bit about what our experiences have been like in the past year and a half as educators for the both of you. I think it's kind of important to understand where we've been in the past year and a half as we're returning to the classroom for the first time.

Brandon Baker:

So I guess what has that been like for you as educators and teachers trying to draw out lesson plans and educate everyone in the most effective way possible?

Caroline Watts:

Phil, you want to...

Philip Gressman:

Sure.

Caroline Watts:

... kind of start?

Philip Gressman:

It was interesting. I remember in the very beginning I had just... so late in November 2020, I had just come back from an NSF panel, and people were talking about this COVID 19 thing and... but it was still the point that they had gathered a whole bunch of people from across the country to just go in person to Washington DC. And there was this sense that was the first time that it really... there was this sense that this was going to happen and we needed to be ready for it. And so I came back and experimented. I bought a video camera and experimented with recording my lectures in the week before spring break before we canceled, and it wasn't easy, and it didn't work very well.

Philip Gressman:

But it's been something that I've been thinking about how it affects teaching since before day one. And it's been really useful, I think, to go back and look at a lot of the things that we do in the classroom that were, in some sense, just kind of automatic things that just kind of happened and really go back and ask the question, "Why aren't we doing these things? What parts of what we do used to do are valuable and what parts aren't," right? What should we focus our resources on, and what can we adapt to, right?

Philip Gressman:

So we spent the entire summer last summer redesigning our calculus curriculum from the ground up to try to put it in a format that would be flexible because at that time, we didn't know if we would be in person in the fall or online. And so we wanted to have a structure that was kind of location-agnostic, right, that could be easily... you could easily flip a switch and it would go online, or you could flip the switch back and you would do the thing in person.

Philip Gressman:

And we realized... actually, it was interesting because we realized that a lot of the things that we needed do to make our class more responsive to pandemic uncertainty were also things that we sort of... we were aware that we really should have been doing all along to address issues like equity in the classroom, right, and inclusive teaching and these sorts of things. And we found that really, we were creating something that we were really proud of and not just something that was thrown together, chaotic response to the pandemic, but we were moving our instruction in a direction that we thought it actually should be going in, anyway.

Philip Gressman:

And so it's been a really interesting time for us in our classrooms.

Brandon Baker:

It sounds like you were a little bit ahead of the curve.

Philip Gressman:

Well, we definitely tried to be because we knew, right, that it was easy to see that if there was going to be a problem, that it was going to be a big problem. And we... this thing about planning calculus, we had a committee of the willing that was formulated in almost a week after we canceled spring break, and there were three or four of us in our department that got together and started having weekly meetings about teaching to figure out what are we going to do for the fall? So we were planning for the fall starting in late March.

Brandon Baker:

Wow.

Philip Gressman:

Because we knew that it would be a big job, and we knew that we wanted to do it right, and we knew that we didn't want to get forced into doing things halfway because we didn't have the time.

Brandon Baker:

I recall that a particular week of spring break, where everything was kind of, sort of on pause while teachers figured out how to transition as everyone is just very suddenly jolted and put into remote learning.

Brandon Baker:

What was that week like for you, Caroline?

Caroline Watts:

It's interesting listening to you, Phil, because I think back to that time, and my experience of this has been, I would say, multilayered. As a parent of two sons who are in school, so one at that time was in college in his freshman year and the other was a junior in high school, as an instructor, as I said, of master's students, so thinking about my students and how were we going to manage the classroom experience for them, and my students are also in internship experiences, so they were out in the community, and we were trying to help navigate their relationships with community partners at the same time as we were thinking about their best learning options. And then finally, our ongoing relationships with the community, with neighborhood partners, with public schools.

Caroline Watts:

So watching the wave of what happened in March of 2020 hit all of those sectors and have my own reactions based on my positionality in all of those sectors, it was a very intense time. It was a very intense time.

Brandon Baker:

What was that evolution like from spring to the fall semester and spring?

Caroline Watts:

So again-

Brandon Baker:

Was there a noticeable line of growth, do you think?

Caroline Watts:

... yes, I do think so because it had to be, and Phil, when you said that we realized this was a problem. Then we realized it was a big problem. And what I thought about after you said that is then it's an ongoing issue that requires ongoing adjustment and then that becomes change. And I think that's where we've been, really, for the last year and even going into this semester, as we're thinking about what's happening now and all the plans we've made for reopening and feeling like we can be back together, and things are uncertain. And so we're asking some of the same questions that we were asking last fall.

Caroline Watts:

So the transition that I saw from March to the launch of last school year was, first and foremost, everybody vaulted for safety as they needed to. And so in my son's school district, everybody pulled back, and there was really no school for a while. And then people put on the ground, school districts put on the ground the best thing they could pull together virtually in a very short amount of time, and it was pretty rudimentary: posting things on Canvas, kids doing a lot of worksheets at home, and just basically making sure we were all safe. And I think that's... our standards were, in a certain way, pretty low at that time, although the worries were ratcheting up.

Caroline Watts:

What we did here was, first and foremost, are our students safe? And we have a lot of international students as well as students who come to us from all over the country, and we had students who had to leave the city, had to leave the country, and we put a lot of energy into making sure that everyone was able to be somewhere where they felt safe. And that was not a neat process at all and was very stressful and draining.

Caroline Watts:

And so over the course of the summer into the fall, I think we were able, once people were in safer positions, to step back and think, as you said, "What kind of teaching do we want to do? And what can we do using virtual technology." And my field as a psychologist, as someone who teaches in the counseling program and as an educator to bring people into this field feels very much like we are focused on being in close relationship all the time. And the biggest concern my students have had is, "Can I learn to be a counselor if I'm not in the same room with someone?" And as an educator, I value that kind of close relationship as well, as I'm sure you do.

Caroline Watts:

We learned a lot about how to initiate and sustain and grow relationships through virtual technology last year. And we learned that in some cases, making connections actually was easier for some people based on their comfort level with what they were engaging in, while at the same time, there were compromises that I think we all feel that we'll never get back, experiences we'll never get back. And I certainly heard that from my kids, and I heard it from kids in our communities.

Brandon Baker:

I'm curious if you think there are some lessons to be gleaned from counseling and bringing that into the classroom and how you teach in terms of what works for counseling versus in the classroom.

Caroline Watts:

That's a great question. And the first thing that comes to my mind is something that a student said in class last year in the fall as all of us were struggling to think about how we were going to establish good counseling relationships with a lot of students working, as my students were, in public schools where either they didn't have regular access to technology or they turned off the cameras. They didn't show up the way we think of showing up. And this student said to all of us, "I've learned that establishing trust looks different, and I've learned to look for different markers of how our relationship grows," and she said it more eloquently than I'm repeating it right now, but she remembered how excited she was when this one student she met with weekly finally turned on his camera and how it felt to hang in there with him, essentially almost flying in the dark when you think of a dark screen.

Caroline Watts:

So I think that often in our own classrooms, we think we may have an idea of how our students are doing and reacting based on markers that we take for granted that maybe we need to reconsider. And I've certainly spent a lot of time reflecting on that in my own teaching, looking for more overt kinds of feedback and questioning my own assumptions which I think is something that as good educators we always need to do, but questioning them even more.

Brandon Baker:

Right. It's an interesting position to be in as a psychologist and an educator in the classroom.

Brandon Baker:

I was hoping you could talk a bit about the Project for Progress that you've been working on, since you are very specifically focused on kind of understanding this anxiety that students will be experiencing whenever they're back in the classroom.

Caroline Watts:

Right. So when our work in the community, specifically in Learning Network Two and the elementary schools closest to the Penn community, we spent a lot of time this past academic year working with the assistant superintendent and the leaders in those schools thinking about how we can better support what they're trying to do in their own educational environments and trying to partner with them around their own frustration and fears around what their students were not getting and were getting and working with all of the anxiety that we all have experienced about what's best for everyone, what's safe. There's been so much conversation about what is lost. There also should be a lot of conversation about what is gained or what we can do moving forward.

Caroline Watts:

So we started planning last winter for what this summer could look like. And so through generous support from Projects for Progress and also from the William Penn Foundation, we were able to put on the ground an in-person experience for over 200 students in rising grades one through eight in West and Southwest Philadelphia through a partnership with the Netter Center and through several organizations at Penn GSE, including the Philadelphia Writing Project, the Responsive Math Teaching Project, and the Center for Professional Learning and our counseling programs.

Caroline Watts:

So we put together a program that was really designed to give both students and the educators that participated practice in what it feels like to get back together again and dealing with the nerves and anxiety around physical proximity, greasing all of our wheels around teaching in the classroom and for the students around being in a classroom, connecting with peers again and also, just having fun. And so we were really excited to see it happen. And I think we're still evaluating, obviously, the feedback that we got but overall, there was a lot of joy in that building, mostly around the kids being back together and reconnecting with the experience of being with friends and doing things that felt like things that they should be doing.

Caroline Watts:

And so for this academic year, we're going to be following up with schools in that network around the same academic support content areas. But we're also putting a lot more resources into mental health supports, not only for students, but for staff and teachers because the stress on educators this year, on the adults has really been phenomenal. And we're concerned that in order to continue to be present for kids, that the adults really need a lot of supports as well.

Brandon Baker:

What are some of those stressors for the two of you?

Philip Gressman:

I think it's just the uncertainty of it all. The way that things have unfolded has been very real, right? There were missteps, there were things that people thought were the case that turned out not to be the case. There was progress and then there were setbacks, right? It's not... it doesn't follow this neat narrative of progression. It's just kind of doing whatever it's going to do. And I think that is one of the things that I find to be the most unsettling about it is that it's just there's so much that we don't know. There's so much... I mean, and lots of things that we didn't normally experience in life like shortages of things, difficult to purchase things. There were lots of changes, right?

Philip Gressman:

It was in the early days I had to go through a lot of personal growth to be able to stay in my house 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, right, because I was just used to being out and being busy and we have a son who was, at that time, four years old and required constant supervision, right. And so we had... there were all kinds of changes that were made, and these constant feelings of, "Am I balancing this in the right way," second-guessing your decisions and feeling very acutely the loss of capacity, right? All of these things were things that are really kind of just... I would like to say that they're gone, but they're not. They still sometimes come back, right, and they're just like any, like all kinds of, sort of on the ground, day-to-day features of this pandemic are just things that are genuinely frustrating, upsetting, scary, that kind of thing.

Brandon Baker:

[inaudible 00:21:24] poet, Vinati Bhola in her 2017 poetry collection, Udaari, "I was not born with the roses in my chest to be afraid of thorns. I was born to bloom in spite of them."

Caroline Watts:

This pandemic has hit us in all domains. And so it's often hard to compartmentalize aspects of ourselves and say, "I'm going to be my professional self and my personal self and my mom self or my daughter self," and this pandemic hits absolutely all elements of that and, Phil, I thought your examples were really right on about that.

Caroline Watts:

So I think the part of what's been so exhausting is the ways in which each of us have felt that impact and managing those as our own stress has risen and managing those as it impacts our ability to function in any other domain. And so that's something that I think my field allows me to think about professionally a lot, but I've had to really work with my own personal impacts, as you have, the impacts of my parenting, losses that all of us have sustained during this period, and talking about that in class makes it easier and I think is a way of modeling for my students how we work with our personal selves as we are professional supports to other people. but it's constant work and then learning how to set boundaries so that you can function professionally while managing all of that personal impact is challenging.

Caroline Watts:

It's about managing anxiety. This has been a long lesson globally in managing anxiety that's very real and at times is accelerated by other things that, as you said, that we rely on that aren't there anymore or not knowing what to trust and who to trust.

Brandon Baker:

Does that hit differently in mathematics which is [inaudible 00:23:30] certainty in some senses and predictability?

Philip Gressman:

Well, I think it's... I mean, I think it's really sort of hard to separate it out, right, because it's like in the... I mean, in the classroom, of course, it didn't... so over the last year, COVID wasn't something that came up in the curriculum, but it was also not a thing that we didn't talk about because you just can't not talk about it, right? And there were... and you... in the first semester, there were students who were like, "We were immediately sent home" and students who were sent home to places that were not safe for them and all kinds of things that normally, you wouldn't... I mean, when you have an in-person residential experience at Penn, all kinds of things that you just never experience all of a sudden started happening and that aspect of it? Yeah, as an instructor, it's like, "Well, you've never experienced this before, and you're not quite sure what your role is as an instructor," but it's happening and it's... and you're off, and you've got to do your best right now," right?

Philip Gressman:

And so I think that's the way that it's been, and you see students who... we're learning environments, you Zoom with them, and you just think, "Boy, I don't see how you can learn in the environment that you're in. It's so distracting. There's so much stuff going on." And you really... it really makes you think a lot about, "Well, how do we carry on in a way that can foster learning and also be more fair to the students recognizing that the playing field that we tried to level as much as possible was just pulled right out from under us, and the students were all in their own unique circumstances for the last year."

Caroline Watts:

I think that's a great point. I think for our students and ourselves and again, for students that we worked with in the community and for adults that we worked with in the community, Zoom life gave us a window into people's personal spaces that at times felt intrusive and not comfortable or necessarily appropriate, but taught us a lot if we were willing to look, and that is information we should really hold on to and make us think more about, again, how we are forming relationships and the assumptions we have about who our students are to us, who we are to them, what we're asking them for the kinds of supports that we can provide to help learning really happen.

Caroline Watts:

Before I was a psychologist, I was a middle school math teacher. Never did great in calculus, but middle school math I could do. And one of the things that really drew me to that was it was about solving problems. I loved algebra because it's about solving problems, especially when you don't know what something is, so you have a variable to represent that.

Caroline Watts:

So the process of how you think through things is something that I think our fields really have in common. And so watching all of us learn how to think through we're navigating day to day life has been [inaudible 00:26:49] I think the richness of this experience, if we will, and to the degree that we've been able to establish a learning environment where our students and we feel comfortable enough to expose some of that and share it and share the goods and bads with it. I think we've all taught each other a lot, but that's also making a lot of lemonade out of some things that are harsh realities that we also have to confront.

Brandon Baker:

And I think a problem we're essentially solving now is how to hold on to those lessons from the pandemic as we're reentering the classroom in person. So how are you two approaching that as we enter the semester in this totally new, but also familiar learning environment.

Philip Gressman:

So I think in many ways, this semester is the semester that I had in mind when I was thinking about what to do last summer. And I think that the lesson that we learned and sort of spending time, like you say, sort of trying to formulate this sort of mess into a problem that can be manipulated and sort of... and solved in some sense is that our sort of strategy is to think about this in terms of, "What's going to be... what do we need to adjust?" There's some unknown things.

Philip Gressman:

One of the unknown things is what will the absence situation be for students, right? Will it be like a normal semester, or will we see more students who are out of class for a longer period of time, right? In a situation where you don't really know what it's going to be, the only thing you can do is be prepared, right? And so we think a lot about how can one sort of reinvent the in-person experience in a way that takes full advantage of what it is that we're doing, but also has this additional flexibility that says, "If you have some students who, for whatever reason, COVID or otherwise, are incapacitated for a little while, how can we make sure that they're not going to be left behind in this process as well?"

Philip Gressman:

So we're thinking a lot about this aspect of the course that we... which is honestly, I mean, to be a little bit self-critical, thinking about students who were absent was often sort of a secondary concern before. And I think now we have to sort of recognize that, we have to recognize that even when we have this conception of what's supposed to happen, we have to be aware that it just won't happen that way for everybody and that we have to make the experience more accessible for everybody. Even the in-person classroom has to change to sort of adapt to this uncertainty.

Philip Gressman:

So that's one of the few things that we're thinking about. We're also thinking about why do we have this in-person experience at all, right? That was a big question that we had a year ago. What's the value of it? And the point is, and that's not to say that there is no value, but the point of it is just that that's a question that I had never really asked myself. Why am I doing this in person? What is happening in person that can't happen some other way that's unique to that modality? And I think that there are answers, right?

Philip Gressman:

So some things that work really well in person are having students engage with each other, doing activities, doing sort of things where you can have sort of high levels of interaction and as an instructor where I can bounce around rapidly from one group to the other or something like this, and these are all things that can be approximated in some sense on Zoom, but they're just not as good as the real thing. And so-

Brandon Baker:

Breakout rooms [crosstalk 00:30:41].

Philip Gressman:

Exactly. Breakout rooms... I did my best, and I managed to get my own sort of show on the road for breakout rooms, but it does not hold a candle to the real thing when you can have people sitting around round tables, for example, working together, and you can go from table to table, and you can sort of stand here and scan the room and see, right? These kinds of things, they're simple things, but they're really, really useful things.

Philip Gressman:

And so our motto is that in-person class time should be used for things that can really only be done in person. And our goal then is to take those things that don't really need to be in person and take them out of the classroom. So a lot of the video content that was recorded last year, it's not going in the trash. It's going to be kept. It's a resource that's going to be updated, and then we're going to... and it's going to be a thing that we continue to use because there is, I mean, there is a certain part of instruction which is more passive, right? And that doesn't need to be done in person, and so we're thinking a lot more about putting the content and the activities in the proper silos.

Caroline Watts:

I think I want to address your question, jumping off of some things that Phil said, from two perspectives. So in terms of my own teaching, I think that my motto is going to be flexibility and going into this semester, I am prepared to change what I'm doing tomorrow, today. I know I'm already shifting as we come towards the first day and thinking about what it's going to look like as we hear news and we hear from our students. So I think a model that I've learned for life is to be prepared to adapt and be flexible and that from a human development perspective, we are stronger if we have a broader repertoire of skills to bring to any situation, and that's something I think about as a therapist and something I think about as an educator. So I'm prepared to shift how we do things.

Caroline Watts:

I do miss aspects of in-person learning and teaching that I think is unique to in-person experience. And so much of what happens in my year-long course is about students bringing in the work that they're doing at their internship sites. So these are often very intense exchanges of very personal material that they're sharing about their learnings from doing counseling. And there's an aspect of that that doesn't translate particularly well over Zoom. So I am looking forward to getting back to some of that and hope that we can hold onto it.

Caroline Watts:

I think the other thing that I miss and that we all miss is something that I think my younger son captured really well. A family member asked him recently what he will miss about high school, and he spent his senior year on our couch for the most part until... pretty much instructionally, most of the year. And he said that he is going to miss the interactions with kids that he didn't see outside of school socially, that he wasn't close to, but that he really liked running into in the halls and in lunch and in classes. So these kinds of encounters that we don't have planned, but that are part of the fabric of a social environment, are what I think we all miss and are longing for. And we're going to have to be, I'm thinking, just this more patient as I think it's part of what keeps us trying to go further than maybe the guidelines are telling us is ultimately safe, and we are inherently social beings, so we're going to have to figure out how to get that part back.

Brandon Baker:

So I want to close by asking why you both feel hopeful in this moment. What makes you feel hopeful, and what do you want your students to genuinely be excited about? This as a... anxiety is a double-edged sword. You get the ominous elements of it, but it's also excitement. And so what do you want them to be excited about?

Caroline Watts:

Trying. I think that looking at, listening to my students at the end of last year, having gone through this entire virtual experience and going out into the job market having had their experience largely virtually, I had students who were very anxious, who felt like they hadn't learned things and then other people who said, "I'm really surprised at how much I have grown. I have grown as much or more than I thought I would have, and I learned to do new things, and I also really want to do things now and that's going to drive what I'm looking for as I launch into my job search."

Caroline Watts:

And so I think we are all trying and that we have figured some things out in ways that maybe we didn't realize we could, and we're going to keep doing that. And there are things right now that are better than they were a year ago, certainly, and a year and a half ago, and some aspects of this problem we do know how to solve and that will help us figure out the other aspects.

Philip Gressman:

I think that's a really good answer.

Philip Gressman:

Well, I think... I mean, one thing that I can say that I've just observed, right, is that you see the students. I think that it's not... it's maybe not as weighted towards the anxiety and for students as it maybe is for instructors, for me, for example, because I've had a chance to see students, and I think that there already is a lot of hope and a lot of optimism on campus. There are a lot of people who are really excited to be back, to get back to those things, those activities, right, the opportunities to see friends, to go to favorite places. And I think we see this already. And so I think I wouldn't say that the mood hanging over the sort of the air right now is one that's entirely gloom, right, but it's just one that's complicated and nuanced, right?

Philip Gressman:

And so I wouldn't want to give an impression that's all there is dread, but because there are a lot of people who are really excited and there's... we can't say exactly how the semester will unfold, and I think that it is important to recognize that, but every day, I mean, in some sense, one of the things that the pandemic can show us is that every day is a gift, right? And while we're here, be that on campus or wherever we are, there's a chance to have those interactions, there's a chance to do those things that you enjoy, and so I think the thing to do is be responsible, but live your life to the extent that you can.

Brandon Baker:

Thank you both for joining today and wishing you both a good semester.

Philip Gressman:

Thanks.

Caroline Watts:

Thank you.

Brandon Baker:

Thanks for listening to Understand This, a production of the Office of University Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. We hope you'll join us again for more interdisciplinary conversations about today's world.

Brandon Baker:

To keep up with Understand This and news at the University of Pennsylvania, follow @Penn on Twitter or sign up for the Penn Today newsletter at penntoday.upenn.edu.