THIS ISN’T WORKING—tales of teaching during the pandemic
A year into the pandemic, anniversary effect in full swing, I have to weigh in from the teaching side to say that I don’t really think this is working.
I remember last spring attending some TEAMS meetings at the small college where I teach writing and optimistically saying that the positive of COVID was it forcing us into a tech space where we could reach all students, virtually, all over the world, all the time. I was excited about the upheavals to traditional education. I remember talking around fire pits last summer about how I thought higher education as we knew it was about to undergo a long overdue and exciting overhaul. I have long bucked against the lecture/memorize/regurgitate model as a way to engage the brain and assimilate true learning. I was giddy about more a la carte academic experiences.
I even suggested that my own sixteen-year-old should just sit for the GED and be done with high school now. (You can read more about this in a future post, but he opted for online college courses as his 11th grade homeschooling curriculum and now that our high risk family member is vaccinated, intends to go back for spring term of 11th grade in person in order to connect with his peers and play sports.)
I was excited that the asynchronous vs. synchronous model of choice could reward motivated learners and negate what I call the babysitting element of in-person, traditional school. I had a lot of high hopes.
And then I started teaching in this model. To clarify, I teach in a modality that is called HYBRID and HYFLEX. This means that Mondays and Wednesdays, unless we are in an all-virtual mode for COVID reasons, I wear a mask and stand in front of a class of socially distanced, masked students. On one screen in front of me is the work I am presenting, and on another screen are the boxes representing students attending the class in synchronous virtual mode. There are two large screens that mirror this set-up in front of the classroom of in-person students and there is an OWL, a device that videos and presents me or whoever is speaking in the room to the virtual students in real time. Often, I go into the classroom to teach, and nobody shows up.
By choice, on Fridays, in order to level the playing field for the virtual students and prepare us to be all online if needed, I teach 100% online from home, unmasked, and everyone is in “Brady Bunch mode”—faces on screens.
I say faces on screens, but the problem is, despite requirements, despite threat of penalty for attendance grades, despite having backgrounds to choose from to fill in the space behind them, students do not turn their cameras on. I ask every day. First, there is a flurry of comments in the chat, explaining why they can’t turn their cameras on. Their WIFI is bad, their tech isn’t working, they’re driving (!) Admittedly, a few do, and when others don’t, most turn them off. While straight-lecturing is not my strong suit, and not how I like to run my class (I usually do thirds of presentation, some kind of collaborative group work and discussion), the lack of interaction forces me to run my classes like an asynchronous lecture.
I do try to engage. I ask questions, I call on blank screens, and nothing kills the mood like me calling on a student who is signed on, ‘present’ but clearly not at their computer.
Hurling information out into the universe is not how I want to teach because I don’t believe it works, and the grades of my students reflect this. I feel like I am teaching underwater*, that my words are muffled/garbled and that even if I say things 7 times, in person and in writing, students cannot, they do not hear me. Don’t even get me started on the shit-show that is trying to run channels and engage in small group work on Teams.
(*Please don’t take my underwater comment to mean that I resent or am against teaching through a mask—I am so pro-mask it’s not even funny and it doesn’t bother me.)
In order to counter this, I restructured some class time to schedule more one-on-one video conferences with my students, to check in, to see that they’re understanding the expectations of the essays and what is coming up. Last week, on Wednesday and Friday, I video called and conferenced with each of my students in 8 min segments about their final essay and presentation, worth 30% of their grade. This is what I do in place of an exam--a persuasive essay on a topic they are passionate about, and then a 5-7 minute oral presentation of the topic with visual aid—a power point, a poster or a mockumentary. At the end of each one-on-one check in, I told each student what time they were presenting in the schedule during the last week of classes, and what time the paper was due. This information is also in hard copy on the class chat, on the online site that holds all our class info, on the syllabus and on the assignment sheet.
The night before the presentation week, I got a text from a student asking if we had class this week or any homework due. I had to keep the expletives out of my reply. This is the end of the term, the presentation and paper! This is 30% of their grade!
Monday morning, on the first presentation day, less than half of the papers were turned in. The first student I called on to present unmuted and said, “Wait, what are we doing again?”
Student after student was unprepared, unclear, or simply absent, a dark screen.
Historically, these have been some of the best parts of the course. Students persuading and educating their classmates on important topics close to their hearts using a combination of ethos, logos, and implementing the ever-important visual aids for pathos. Of course, there are always the stock topics of legalize marijuana at the federal level, lower the drinking age, and D1 athletes should be paid, but I have seen amazing presentations of topics like protesting the inhumane conditions in ICE hieleras, an exposé on the Greyhound dog-racing world, and pro-life/pro-choice/pro-assisted suicide presentations that stopped me in my tracks.
Why isn’t that happening this year? Where and how did I fail these students? Where is the engagement? I think the answer is in part that kids are done. You can read my post about HITTING THE DIGITAL WALL here) In thought point responses to articles, and one pass-fail assignment, where students write the story of their life in paragraph topic sentences, I get glimpses into parts of their stories that I don’t think happens for math or science teachers--tales of rampant anxiety, depression, isolation, bullying, abuse and intense, crippling loneliness. What’s worse is I carry all of this, take it home and worry about them while folding laundry, but unlike in olden times, nobody shares this out loud. It used to be that during discussion, students would bond over episodes of elementary school bullying as we discussed the problem solution essay on this, or talk about their own media addictions when we read the Atlantic article on smartphones, or even share mental health issues or worries for the future. This doesn’t happen. In this modality, they are just mostly silent initials on black boxes on a grid, disconnected, and unengaged. I could walk past more than 75% of my students on campus and not recognize them.
The phrase “shouting into the void” is at risk of being over-used, but the truth is, I can think of nothing that comes closer to how it feels to teach during the pandemic.