It should not be this hard.

A software package created and used by the Center for Disease Control, “the sentinel for the health of people in the United States and throughout the world,” does not work on any laboratory computer, or instructors computer, in the entire School of Public Health at Tulane University. That’s right. The CDC software is non-functional in a School of Public Health.

How do I know? Because I tried to teach an EpiInfo lab to 43 students last night in the SPH computer lab. Apparently, IT staff promises of functioning software (we found similar problems last year and were assured they did not exist this year) do not account for much.

I went to Plan B. We went back to our classroom, where I plugged my laptop up to the podium screen. Students who intended on using their own machines got ready with others piled around them. Then we found that the MyTulane system had corrupted the file (note: the University IT is a mess of Microsoft… if you don’t drink the water, you run into a ton of problems) narrowing our window of working student computers down to about 4. Actually, we’d figure out the corruption problem later. In the meantime, I demonstrated some of the simple commands needed for the assignment, went through the assignment to discuss how to approach the questions (“Plan C”). Then I offered a solution… since it is not reasonable to expect students to do the computations themselves (we can’t trust the lab), I’ll provide a big mess of output and ask them to shift through the tables and use the given information to answer questions and provide support for their answers. Ack.

Upside: Paul had arranged for a babysitter as a treat, picked me up, and took me to La Crepe Nanou for dinner.