Back to the Before Times?
I know every academic everywhere is posting this right now, but: last week I had students in a classroom on campus for the first time in exactly 18 months and one day. My Last Normal Class was Thursday, March 12, 2020, and when I went home that day I didn’t know I wouldn’t see a student face to face again for a year and a half.
On September 13, 2021, I welcomed nine masked students into a classroom on campus, with the rest tuning in to the lesson via Zoom (it’s called hybrid teaching and however well you think it works, it’s…less well than that. But I’m grateful that the tech they installed is very good quality! It’s the best possible version of a crappy teaching modality).
It’s been a very long year and a half. And now that it’s - at least for now - looking like we’re on our way to a full return to campus in late October, I can say out loud how much teaching uni courses excusively on Zoom from home made me die inside. I know, I know, poor me being able to do all the essential parts of my job from the easy safety of my home. But in…many? most? ways, this has been the hardest? worst? 18 months of my life. I lost my bicycle commute, my standing desk, my naturally active-on-my-feet workday. I gained weight and an unhealthy familiarity with what my face looks like (thanks, Zoom!). At a time when I sometimes felt suffocated by my own kids during their occasional quarantine periods of online school, I was cut off from my work colleagues and my students, who give me LIFE.
And yet as much as I have looked forward to some kind of return to normal, it has been a little bit scary to re-enter spaces with “so many” other people. I wear a clear plastic visor while lecturing at the front of the class (so that people on Zoom can see my face while speaking a foreign language to them), and put an FFP2 mask on for small-group discussions or one-on-one work. In any given week, I have some lessons completely on Zoom, some with half the class on Zoom and half in the classroom, and some with everyone in the classroom. It just depends on how big of a room I have, and how big of a group, and what year the students are (1st- and 2nd-years have priority for in-person instruction per uni policy).
So there will be entire cohorts of students I will likely never meet in person. And others who I met on Zoom last year and am now seeing in person (that is really fun and feels like healing). I’m looking forward to the day when it will be normal once again to always know my students in real life, not just on Zoom!
