The Emotional Work of Grading

There is quite a bit of talk these days about ungrading, but this post does not go in this direction.

Grades are clearly emotional to students, which might partially explain why they make students so anxious and, simultaneously, so obsessed with them. But this post is also not about this.

This post is about the less-told side of what grading means to the instructor and, in particular, to an instructor that has created the evaluation.

An important start point is that setting up evaluations is hard. My students seem shocked when I tell them that it takes me between one and two full days or work to write a midterm. This is one of these things that do look very different from the other side. The students are probably thinking: well, this guy has 10-15 years of education and knows it all about the topic, so this job is mostly about putting things on paper and formatting. Well, no: as instructors we have to work hard to make sure that any evaluation aligns with the learning objectives (and really tests them), that is not easy to subvert (makes cheating harder than not cheating), that it is clear an unambiguous, that it is not too difficult (because this means too much work later on, and unhappy students), that it is not too easy (since it would remove the student’s incentive to learn), that can be marked fairly (this is trickier than it sounds), and that it does not make my life miserable (i.e., that it does not take forever to mark). In other words, setting up evaluations is a complex multi-objective optimization problem that also requires lots of creativity. And this is all assuming that the midterm is in person and not take home, which adds the risk of being chatGPTized…

Then, once you think you have a good midterm/final exam etc., (or you run out of time), it’s time for the actual test. When this happens in person (i.e., in a large room) it is not unusual to see students leave the exam about 25 minutes in (for a 50 minute exam). Doubts start to creep in… was the midterm too easy? Too difficult? Did I implicitly provide answers to the questions in the class? — time passes and then you have the opposite set of doubts… why are there still so many people who seem to be in the middle of it? Was it too difficult? will I be ruining student’s life’s because of my zeal to make my questions climb up Bloom’s taxonomy little pyramid? In my experience this is usually OK, just the expression of the amazing variability of human timing, behaviour and skill (note: I recognize the issues with timed examinations and how excluding they can be, but this is a discussion for another day).

Now you got your filled exams, and it is time to grade. This is the most nerve-wracking part of the process. It goes like this:

The first one is terrible. It is like they did not understand the question, or they attended a set of lectures of a different course in a different department. It’s very difficult to keep the inner doubts at bay and remain calm and objective; no matter how many times you have read and re-read the questions, you read them again… is there a possibility that this question could reasonably be interpreted in that other strange way? Am I just a gatekeeper of a language and a way to look at the material that is personal, biased and unfair?

The second one is terrible again, but in completely different ways. Were my lectures awful? Was it impossible to get to a reasonable solution with the material, help and time that I have provided during the class? Your mind starts coming up with possible ways to grade more generously… is is fair to give some points just for writing anything in the box? What happens if everyone fails the midterm?

The third one is quite good. Sigh of relief! At least someone gets something!

The fourth one is perfect… How nice! But… did I really teach them anything? Is it possible that they did already know the stuff?

The fifth one is perfect again… was the exam too easy? Did I make it too easy to cheat? how is this possible?

And, of course, after a while you tend to get the full range of answers, with some mistakes more common than others. If you are not grading blind to the name of the student (I prefer blind, although it can be logistically harder than it seems), some answers do seem like a disappointment, almost a betrayal. And, occasionally, you can feel a bit of pride on what you have done.

I expect that the experience of the instructor may vary significantly, especially depending on personality. However, the roller-coaster that I’ve described above is still, for me, and after many years of setting up evaluations and grading, pretty much unchanged.

In summary, we try to be neutral and fair, and leave emotion aside, but grading is hard work, not only because it is tedious work that simultaneously requires a large mental load to be consistent, but because it is emotional work.

The only things that I found that soften the experience a bit for me:

Remind myself that students are people with circumstances. They could have a bad day, a caring duty, a friend in distress, food insecurity (help if you can!).
Recognize that it is not personal. A bad answer is not an insult, and most often than not, it does not reflect the attitude of the student towards you.

How does grading feel to you as a student or an instructor/grader? What are your tricks?

InfoTypography work being presented at SIGGRAPH this week

This week I will be presenting at ACM SIGGRAPH (the top conference in graphics and one of the most prestigious in Computer Science) the work that Johannes Lang and I have done in Infotypography. We looked at how people perceive typographic parameters. This could support the use of these parameters to represent information.

Here is a teaser of the talk (30 seconds):

Here is a fuller, 15 min presentation ():

Here are two links to the paper:
https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530111
Local copy

Here is a website with resources for using it:
https://nacenta.com/infotypography

For those of you who are in Vancouver attending SIGGRAPH, the presentation is:

When: Thursday August 11, 2022
Where: East Building, Ballroom C
Session: Perception

How do people think about Constraint Problems?

A paper on our work about how people think about constraint programming has just been published in anticipation of the prestigious Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2022). The paper is accessible through this address.

The work takes place at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Constraint Programming.

We analyzed how non-experts tried to solve constrained programming problems.

Image showing a few examples of how people solved common constraint programming problems, such as scheduling.

This is work with Ruth Hoffmann, Xu Zhu, and Özgür Akgün, from the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews (my previous main institution).

This follows our previous work on how people visually represent discrete contraint problems (at the IEEE Transations on Visualization and Computer Graphics).

Dr Hoffmann has also presented at ModRef a synthesis on both pieces of work.

Finally, the SACHI group posted a blog post with a bit more information.

My LiveDrive Data Nightmare

TLDR; If you are not backing up your data, do it now. If you back up your data but have not tested if you can recover it, do it now. If you are using LiveDrive to back up your data, you might not be as prepared as you think.

My Previous Data Life

For a very long time I have stored my data in an external drive. Why? Mostly because I do not want the main output from my employment to be locked in a single computer. Often it is very convenient to be able to access the data from another computer. Also, when there is a fire alarm, my drive is the only thing I take. I know that the cloud is a good alternative, but I like to have the data locally and there is something unsettling about trusting Google or Dropbox with your entire digital life and work.

Of course, external drives fail, so I have purchased a subscription to a service which backs up my data on-line, away from my physical location, for over 12 years now.

The Incident

One day I arrive home, set up my USB hard drive on my computer, and the drive does not start. Or rather, it tries to partially start, but fails in a sequence of odd ways.
No biggie… I should be able to recover all files. It is going to take quite a while (it’s close to 1TB), but I should be covered!

I am Prepared… or am I?

Well, after wiping off the sweat from my brow, and taking a glass of water, I set out to the unpleasant and boring (but necessary) task of recovering my data. The most urgent staff first in my computer’s fixed hard drive first, and then the rest on a new external drive that I have ordered. Everything should be in my LiveDrive, right?

Well, the first unpleasant surprise is that LiveDrive downloads my files really really really slow. A full day of data recovery does not even start to make a dent in the 0.8 GB of data (approx) that I had backed up. I’m in a good connection, but maybe it is that the data is stored in Europe (where I used to live), and has to go under the water to get to me. I try a few things to solve this, including a VPN, but it turns out that this is not the problem. The service is extremely slow seemingly because it goes file by file, and it checks the status of each file individually, blocking the download until one file has been done. The download is decent when the file is large, but when you have a folder full of small files (e.g., Thunderbird’s e-mail folders, it slows down to a crawl. Unfortunately, the livedrive interface only lets you select folders, or files, recursively, but in one folder at a time. Additionally, every time you select what to download and it finishes, you have to select again from the backup set starting at the root folder. This goes on for a few days, with much effort and desperation, since my whole research is in there. It is hard and really tedious work of clicking buttons and check marks, taking notes of what is backed up and what is not, what folders should be priority, and trying to avoid those folders with lots of small files. I’m able to recover about 30% of my files this way, but with much effort.

The second unpleasant surprise is that some (important) folders simply do not download. This problem seems to be independent of the issues mentioned above. After some back and forth with LiveDrive’s help desk I am explained that some of the data stored is corrupted and therefore not downloadable. Their technical team are working on it, and they will update me of the progress. After some back and forth with them reminding them regularly for about 3 months I simply desist. After a year and a half I’m still to hear from them.

Contact with LiveDrive’s help desk results in reasonable response times, but not typically very useful. Comments about the problems of the interface are put in feature requests for the (presumably distant) future, while comments about the slow down seem to simply be above the pay grade of the helpdesk staff. They are generally pleasant. After they recognize that some of the data is corrupted, they offer to refund me what I have paid them so far “as a courtesy”.

What I Have Learned

Not all backup companies are the same. LiveDrive might be OK if you are just backing up only photos or videos, but the moment that you have to backup a real computer folder, e.g., with folders containing program state, e-mail folders, bookmarks, software that you have built, et cetera, the system is not viable any more.
The interface seems adequate at the beginning, affording most of the actions that you might expect to need (e.g., to find a file in the folder tree and ask for it to be downloaded). However, the reality is that when it comes to actual work, there are small details that can make the difference between hours of tedious work and minutes. As they say, God is in the details.
Losing much of your data can be debilitating. It is not only your set up of things; it is that you cannot trust any more to find the things where you left them. As an academic, I rely a lot on my drive, which is my “prosthetic memory”, for a multitude of things (creating a new talk, reporting activities, applying for tenure…). Not knowing whether you are going to find what you thought you had is sometimes even worse that knowing that you do not have it at all. It forces you to do a lot of clicking, it makes you feel insecure about your memory, and it reminds you every time of those negative feelings and the feeling of helplessness of the whole process. I’m not prone to depression, but there are very few other things that have made me feel so s****y about my work.
Hardware drive recovery is expensive and very disappointing when what comes back is minimal.

How I feel about the whole thing

More than a year and a half after the incident, I still have not completely recovered. My skin still crawls when I think back about it, and sometimes thinking back is unavoidable. A silver lining: I have learned to let go of some data, and perhaps not being so reliant on storing things in drives (although I still like to have most of my stuff in my own drive).

I also think that LiveDrive giving back my payments is like an insurance company giving you back your premiums if your house goes on fire. I have no animosity against the people in the helpdesk who helped me. They are probably underpaid, and it feels like the rest of the company is just in “automatic pilot mode”, without really any interest in improving the service, but more in milking their existing infrastructure and software (which is clearly not fit for purpose).

What I Recommend

If your data is not backed up, please please please please, back it up somehow now. At least the most important stuff should not be difficult to put on dropbox, google drive, etc.

If your data is backed up in a service, set aside some time to give it a serious test. Consider the following questions: how long would you consider acceptable to recover your data? How much work would you want to do for what you are investing now?

Student Paper on Representations and Transformations

Adam Binks (A PhD Student at the University of St Andrews) and myself (Miguel Nacenta) just published an article in the International Journal of Human Computer Studies) about our recent research.

Adam built a new tool to support people when transforming complex networks of thoughts and ideas into text prose. The tool itself (called Write Reason) and a short description of what we found when we studied essay writers using the tool is accessible through the WriteReason site.

One of the most interesting things about our findings is that there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in between the creation of different representations of the ideas. In other words, transformations between representations are much more complex, interesting and important than we thought before.

This post is also in the VIXI website.

JCURA Nominations Open for next Academic Year

Jamie Cassel Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA) nominations are open for 3rd and 4th year students at UVic. See: https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/LearnAnywhere/jcura/ If you are one of these students and want to try out research in Human-computer Interaction, reach out to me by e-mail. Many of my projects are visible in https://vixi.cs.uvic.ca/positions/, but there are many more possibilities. You might also have your own!

Just send me a short e-mail to nacenta@uvic.ca and we will explore!

How to talk to your supervisor about what you have read

This is a post in a series of posts regarding student-supervisor communication.

Audience: you are a PhD or MSc or project student, and you meet your supervisor regularly. In the previous meeting, your supervisor asked you to do research in some topic area, perhaps by a keyword (e.g., please do some search in the area of “provenance in User Interfaces”), or perhaps through another paper (e.g., follow the references in this other paper).

Naturally, you have done the work, and you have read (there will be another post on what this means in the future) a bunch of papers. Now you come to your supervisor, eager to demonstrate that you have done what you were expected to do, and indeed, you have found and read some interesting papers.

What NOT to do

Perhaps more important than the “do’s”, consider the things that you should avoid. Unless your supervisor has explicitly asked for any of these, you should NOT:

Detail the contents of a paper in general (your supervisor would generally not be interested in the full content of the paper. If they already know it what is the point on repeating pretty much everything on it? If they are not familiar with it, they probably will not be interested in the full content, but only in how it relates to your own project; your supervisor has probably very little time for this, and communication about previous work usually needs to be done in an efficient way.
Read a summary that you have written (if you have written something about a paper, your supervisor can probably read it much faster than you can read it aloud – if you really need them to read your summary, and they agree with this, send it in advance of your meeting).
Forget, loose or misplace the paper (your supervisor might want to come back to it, it is your responsibility to be able to retrieve that paper quite quickly if you need to).
Insist on going over all the information that you have retrieved without paying attention to your supervisor’s reception of it (your supervisor). Do not discuss things that you do not think are important.

What to do

These are all items that you might not know are important, but are often key for good communication about research.

Background and context: Not all papers are created equal or are going to have the same importance. If you only list the title (and yes, the title is important), you are missing many of the ways in which your supervisor might help you filter out the really relevant papers from those which are not. More specifically, this is information that is likely to be useful:

Year (of publication). This information is key. The paper might be precisely about your topic of interest, but too old to have been important. Perhaps the opposite: the paper is very old and incredibly relevant, but has been ignored. Or the paper just came up last month and your supervisor is not aware of it (and should be!). Making all these judgments is much more difficult without the date.
Authors. It is important for you to start recognizing the people who have work a lot in that particular subarea, and their collaborators and students. Your supervisor might use that information to remember about other important papers by the same author, or to assign more weight to that paper because they trust the author (or even know it personally). Put the authors next to the title if you are showing only a subset of the paper. Sometimes knowing which institutions the authors come from can be useful. For example, if they come from a place that is well-known for research in the area.
Venue. Although it is not a perfect correlation, a paper published in a reputable and competitive venue is likely to be more important, since it denotes interest by the community, and some degree of rigour. A paper in a leading venue which is ignored in a literature review is also likely to cause more trouble in the review cycle, whereas most reviewers will easily forgive (or forget) a poster in an unknown or disreputable venue.
Format/length. Scientific publications come in many shapes and forms. For example, a valuable piece of scientific writing can be a textbook, a chapter in a textbook, a chapter in an edited book, a survey article, a long journal article, a paper, a short paper, a poster, a position paper, or even a blog or a tweet. It does not help if your notes, summary or what you are showing or describing to your supervisor hides what kind of publication it is. Your supervisor (and yourself) can use this information to determine the importance and value of that work.

Note that giving some kind of impression of the above should take very little time. You do not have to list or read aloud the whole list of authors, but having it out there so that your supervisor can take a glance at it can be very useful.

Content: An article or piece of scientific literature typically contains much information, more than you can efficiently convey within a meeting. If you have to summarize any part of the work, because you think it is relevant, this does not mean necessarily that this is going to be a piece of text. There are often different kinds of elements that might be way more effective at summarizing a paper. For example:

A diagram included in the paper.
An image of the system/technique that describes the core of the paper (or the part that is most related to your work).
A short fragment of video.
A formula.
A table (with results or a taxonomy)
A chart showing results (e.g., a bar chart).
A couple of sentences describing results of conclusions (yes, this is text, and is legitimate).

Note that any of the elements above might be incredibly difficult to understand in isolation, but this is why you are having a meeting: a quick few sentences can help make any of these items really effective.

Relationship: Probably the most important reason why your supervisor wants you to read a piece of scientific literature is because it relates to your work. Very often this relationship remains implicit. You should be able to describe as succinctly and accurately as possible how what you have read relates to one or more of the following (depending on the stage of your research):

The fundamental issues, techniques or technologies upon which your work builds upon.
One or more of your research questions.
The specific contribution that you are hoping to make in your research.
What you have designed/built/proposed already.
The methodologies that you have applied.

By making explicit the relationship between your work and what you have read, you are also communicating a number of things that are important for the supervisory relationship and signalling your level of maturity in research. For example, your supervisor will learn to what extent you are able to relate your work to the close and fairly distant (perhaps only abstractly related) pieces of literature, and whether you really understand the contributions of existing work. This is a kind of syntopical reading or deep reading that is very important for academic work.

Please let me know if you have found this article useful, or if you have concrete examples, or possible improvements that you think I can use to improve it.

Post-Doctoral Researcher Position

I am looking for a researcher/scientist interested in Human-Computer Interaction, Cognition and Information Visualization, to become part of our new and growing VIXI group as a Post-doctoral fellow.

Where: University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
What: A Post-doctoral Fellowship, 1 to 2 years in length
When: Applications being evaluated now, until position filled. Start is negotiable.

Requirements

An PhD degree in computer science, psychology/neuroscience, software design or software engineering, or a completion date for such PhD within the next few months.
Evidence of ability to publish in their area of expertise.
Experience with at least one of the following methodologies (in no particular order of importance):
- Qualitative observation and qualitative analysis (e.g., grounded theory).
- Controlled experiment design, execution and analysis.
- Advanced human-sensing methodologies. For example gaze-tracking, EEG, FNRIS, motion tracking.
- Contextual analysis.
Ability to program.
A willingness to work with and mentor students at all levels (undergraduate, MSc, PhD).

Topics and Interests

The candidate will work with current research students, with the main supervisor (Dr Miguel Nacenta) on common projects, and will also have time to further their own research. Current research interests of Dr Nacenta include:

Supporting non-experts in complex cognitive tasks such as planning, estimation, prediction and problem solving through novel technologies.
Enabling groups and communities to work effectively together on complex cognitive tasks such as planning, estimation, prediction and problem solving.
Finding effective representations of problems and data to enable better communication and enhanced problem solving.
Reducing the friction imposed by current interfaces and input devices on complex cognitive tasks.
Novel interfaces and visualization techniques for reading and thinking.

You can access recent published work by Dr Nacenta through his Google Scholar Profile

What to do

If you are interested in becoming our partner in learning and research, send an e-mail to nacenta(at)uvic(dot)ca with the following information:

A CV or resumé which includes a list of publications.
A cover letter that describes why you’d like to work with us, what you main skills are, and your research area of interest going forward in your research career.
The names, positions, and e-mail of 2 referees.

What we offer

One to two year employment as a full member of our lab and the Department of Computer Science of the University of Victoria; Salary starting at CAD$50K, but negotiable based on merit and/or experience of the candidate; Opportunities to contribute to teaching (only if so desired); A supportive community of scholars and students.

Who we are

The Victoria Interactive eXperiences with Information (VIXI) group is a newly formed research group in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Visualization and Cognition. With three faculty (Sowmya Somanath, Charles Perin, Miguel Nacenta), and over 16 students at different levels, we aspire to be a diverse learning community that supports the growth of each member while also contributing to research at an international level of excellence and impact.

Where we are located

Victoria is the Capital of British Columbia, the westernmost province of Canada. Surrounded by water, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, is part of a vibrant urban area of close to 400,000 inhabitants, yet surrounded by amazing nature and parks. The city has an extensive network of cycling paths (for commuting or leisure), great access to outdoor activities (kayaking, scuba diving, mountain biking, hiking, skiing – further north in Vancouver Island or across the Salish strait), and good connections through its International Airport and ferries to the mainland and the United States. The city is extremely child-friendly and has probably the mildest climate in Canada, with an average temperature in January of 5 degrees Celsius and mild summers. Average precipitation is about half that of nearby Vancouver (107km away as the crow flies) due to the rain shadow effect of the Olympic Mountains to its South.

We acknowledge and respect the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on whose traditional territory the University of Victoria stands and the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

St Andrews + UVic PhD Scholarship on Machine Learning and Visualization

We are advertising a unique cross-continental opportunity to carry out cutting-edge research on Machine Learning and Information Visualization across two continents at two leading institutions, the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and the University of Victoria (Canada).

For administrative details, conditions and an initial description of the research see: the official Scholarship Announcement.

Supervision is collaborative between Dr Juan Ye and Uta Hinrichs (St Andrews) and myself (Miguel Nacenta–University of Victoria). Applications are accepted until June 30th, 2020. Feel free to drop me a line at nacenta at uvic dot ca if you want to discuss your application informally with me.

Postgraduate Supervision in the COVID19 Era (for Supervisors and Students)

I moved to the University of Victoria (Canada) in January, so I have since been working with my St Andrews PhD students remotely who, for a number of reasons, preferred not to move continents to Victoria with me. This means that we are quite used at the moment to work remotely.

Remote PGR supervision has its challenges, yet I believe it is important to acknowledge that the new constraints imposed by the virus, quarantines, social distancing etc. add an additional layer of complexity to the whole situation. I also believe that postgraduate students are likely to suffer the extraordinary situation particularly hard because with the additional burden to move to online teaching, supervisor’s energy and time will be in shorter supply. Here are just a few of my thoughts regarding remote supervision (first), and regarding supervising during quarantine (second).

Remote Supervision

I think it is important to acknowledge that remote supervision is harder than in-person supervision. For a number of reasons:

It is harder to read the mood of people through a remote connection, even if there is video (this cuts both ways… I know that my students can sometimes tell that I’m in a bit of a mood). Without the ability to judge mood and attitude accurately it is harder to make the right calls regarding next steps, tone etc.
I find that it is just that bit harder to be compassionate, empathetic and understanding when you are separated by a long distance and, perhaps more importantly, by a few hours in our daily cycle. I meet my students in the morning, since I’m 8 or 9 hours behind. This means that my students are mostly at the end of their days when I’m still full of energy; this has a significant effect.
The serendipitous and opportunistic contacts that one has at work are important for students; if you cross them in the hallway, they know you are here, you know they are here. A quick question or two minute talk, or even a sentence might not only give each other acknowledgement of each other’s needs (“yes, I’ll get to read your chapter soon! I have not forgotten!”), but it might also save a significant amount of time if they don’t have to wait until the next meeting to get a little bit of help.
The opportunistic encounters with other members of staff are also important for the students and for the supervisor in order to support the students. For example, that little bit of awareness of the member of the Systems Support Team who tells you that certain service will have to be down soon, or that a certain machine needs replacement.
It simply is harder to critique, point out issues, discuss ideas that have a graphical substrate when you are connecting over video conference. I cannot count the number of times that I had to sketch something on paper and awkwardly held it in front of the camera, trying to point at different areas of the sketch, or the number of times that I tried to scroll on a document which is really just a shared desktop from the other side. This is a real issue in Computer Supported Collaborative Work that has not really been solved yet in the mainstream, despite the efforts of many in the CSCW community, including my mentors Saul Greenberg and Carl Gutwin.

Supervision in COVID19 times

Everything in the previous section applies to the current quarantine situation, sometimes amplified. And some aspects are new:

Both supervisors and students are anxious, even if they are often not ready to admit it to themselves, much less to others. Being a PhD student is more often than not a difficult thing, with the justifiable stress and anxiety of academia and trying to prove oneself. Now imagine how this feels when you add the uncertainty of not being able to run experiments, have access to your usual materials, or having to go through extra hoops to just be able to do what is expected of you. Anxiety and extra work can be particularly damaging for deep work.
Loneliness can be a real issue. Most people rely on looser or tighter communities for support. Postgrads who work remotely tend to find it much harder to find the motivation and energy to sustain focus and work without a group of peers. Self-isolation and social distancing is much more likely to wipe out these sources of peer-support than many other practices, probably because the value and perception of these networks is easy to underestimate.
Some people’s life circumstances are being affected more than others. Being away from family, having to care for dependents, or even trying to help out the communities one belongs to (e.g., elderly residents in the same apartment building) can take a very significant toll on people’s time and energy.

Strategies and tools worth thinking about (for remote, COVID or both)

I have never been a perfect supervisor, but I try hard to do right by my students. Despite knowing that I can get much better at this, I believe that there are some obvious and not so obvious things that can work:

Remember that we are all, above anything else, people. With our vulnerabilities and needs, good and bad moments. It is surprisingly easy to forget to be human, and caring and compassionate and just adopt a role as the conscientious student or the wise and driven supervisor as we interact with each other. Although it sounds obvious, make sure to start every contact with a sincere effort to relate, connect and care. This applies to both students and supervisors.
I believe that it helps to know that it is normal to not be as productive remotely as you imagine you have been in the past. This is even more important within the current unprecedented circumstances. Procrastination and lack of focus is not just a matter of pure will (no matter how many times we convince ourselves that we can just “power through”) and achieving sufficient progress in research work is a constant challenge that we fight everyday, a problem never definitively solved. Therefore, if you did not have a good day, forgive yourself a bit, practice a bit of self-compassion, and reassure yourself that it will get better tomorrow.
It helps to know that for most institutions, the top allegiance is to their students. Despite many people’s cynicism, I have found this to be consistently true throughout my experience (UVic is my 8th institution, not counting Microsoft Research). As a student you might be feeling very insecure about deadlines, regulations and funding. It is good to have some pressure to make sure that the work keeps moving on but, in my experience, an overwhelming majority of people in academia understand Hofstadter’s law, and institutions tend to know to be flexible when they need to be. You still have to do your best, but you will get some leeway.
Listen extra hard. This applies to both sides of the supervision relationship. It is particularly hard to listen and connect when one is stressed and overloaded, so it is particularly important to remember to listen in these circumstances, and give each other the opportunity to share the challenges, problems and feelings arising.
Communicate to your supervisor. They can help you. One of the harder tasks for a supervisor is to assess the state of mind of many of the students. As a student, it is tempting to try to present a flawless appearance of invulnerability and performance, but it is much better to actually share the challenge and the feelings. This, of course, relies on the trust invested in the relationship, and it flows in both directions. Although difficult to do, I think it pays off to share the challenges and vulnerabilities that we experience as supervisors as well.
For supervisors: It helps to have great colleagues (who can be proxies) and are physically closer to the students. This is more relevant to the more general issue of remote supervision than to the current quarantine situation, but it can help as well. I have been lucky to have good collaborators still in St Andrews (call out tothe amazing Juan Ye, Ozgur Agkun, Alice Toniolo, Uta Hinrichs and Aaron Quigley) who are good points of contact for the students when they need to. They can also supply a bit of that co-located experience that is so reassuring.
It is helpful for both student and supervisor to acknowledge that working remotely requires additional “meta-work” to work smoothly. That is, it takes time and work to figure out how to work together more efficiently. This can take the form of extra thinking about how to best schedule meetings, figuring out substitutes for support, or even spending some time learning and finding new tools and technology.
Some new tools are actually quite amazing, and can help (and they keep evolving!) Although I personally find some of the new communication trends such as Slack quite overwhelming and difficult to keep up on top of (too many “channels” of information to keep track of, when considered on top of e-mail, which is still king for me), some other tools can be fantastic. Sometimes one has to even remind itself to use these tools, even if we know that they will work better. My two favourite examples right now are miro, a collaborative diagramming tool that works well when used synchronously with a source of audio on the side (typically Skype for me), and opening a shared Google Doc when brainstorming ideas, which I found can be transformative.

Some of you might have different tips and ideas. I’m sure I have missed a lot here, and I can learn a lot more. Even better, some of you might disagree with me. In any of these cases, I’ll be very happy if you let me know through a comment or by e-mail.