It’s Wednesday again and I am about to invite my students into my bedroom, who will welcome me to theirs. That’s not something I imagined myself ever saying and in the age of #metoo it feels profoundly disorienting having to explain this particular reality. But I no longer have access to my office on campus; my son is in the living room, playing video games with his friends online; and I have to retreat to a quiet place. We are all confined to semi-private spaces in our own homes – bedrooms, basements, closets – teaching and learning remotely via a whole host of technologies that a week ago I didn’t even know existed. Now I’m an “expert” in organizing Zoom meetings for synchronous teaching and recording my lectures via Panopto, the recording tool supported by our online learning platform, to ensure asynchronous learning. Sure, I try to disguise some of the realities and carefully position my computer camera so as to capture the bookshelf behind me rather than the piles of laundry or scattered papers on the floor. Like my kids, I’ve resorted to wearing sweat pants most days, but I focus the webcam on my torso, which I stuffed into a blouse and a blazer. I never before felt the need for performing professionalism in this manner, but now it seems the only way to communicate to my students that I’m taking my role here seriously. Sweatpants or not, I try to remain a source of stability, even if my lectures keep poking holes in that very notion.
When I first learned that all of us would teach exclusively online, I dreaded the potential technological disruptions – internet failures, platform overloads, connection problems – but I was eager to see my students, to talk to them, to make sure they are okay. Actually, seeing their faces and hearing their voices, even if only in a Zoom classroom, was one of the few comforting moments of COVID time. In both of my classes, students shared where they are, whom they are with and how they had weathered this initial time of transition. We laughed together at the weirdness of it all, maybe because we all realized that none of it is funny. I don’t know how it would have been if we didn’t already know each other, if we didn’t have weeks of animated classroom discussion to look back on. When we resumed online, it was obvious that every single one of us was determined to leave their own personal stress behind and for the next ninety minutes dive into a different world – a world of concepts, ideas, of historical events and actors. In both classes the topics of discussion connected eerily with the present crisis. In Wastes of War: A Century of Destruction we discussed Edmund Russell’s argument on the co-evolution of chemical warfare and pest control, in Global Environmental History from the Paleolithic to the Present we focused on the growth of the modern state to control populations and combat repeated Cholera epidemics with sewer construction and municipal garbage collection.
There is something strangely satisfying about being able to provide a frame of reference, to make sense of our own chaotic present. Yes, there are awkward moments for sure. The video freezes. Someone forgets to mute their microphone and the rest of the class can hear the clicking of the keyboard. I have to yell at my kid to turn the volume of the TV. The roommate opens the door and shuts it again, smiling apologetically at the screen. A student eventually raises their real hands and waves at me because I failed to notice the little blue hand icon on screen, indicating their desire to get a word in. And yet, we accomplished a lot. We even argued.
Initially, I worried that I will just bore my students to death. In a pre-Covid world, I would pace around the classroom or the auditorium, drawing students into the discussion whether seminar or large lecture, probing for questions and opinions, incorporating hands-on activities, group work, film screenings, museum visit, field trips. Well, we can stream the films on canvas, but my field trip has obviously been canceled. Now, I lecture into my computer, wondering whether I sound too subdued or too animated, whether I look stiff and uncomfortable or whether my gesticulations make it seem as though I’m a bit unhinged. And then Panopto sends me an error message, informing me that it stopped recording. I start over. Frustrating as these technological glitches are, they are manageable. With time, I hope I will find a way to adapt my teaching style, develop an online modus operandi that will be true to my pedagogical convictions and jive more naturally with this new teaching infrastructure. Right now, I’m sure a lot of what I do must look, sound and feel awkward. It certainly does to me. I try to remember that I am not the only one performing here. My students are in a very similar position. They need to convince me that they have done the reading, perform for their peers and potentially defend the fact that cloister themselves off from their co-inhabitants, even if there are more pressing demands, distracting worries and the numerous challenges of COVID time that require their constant attention.
The first week, my first week of online teaching ever, went surprisingly well, not because I’m particularly skilled at using Panopto or Zoom (I am most certainly not), but because my students are as invested in their classes as I am. Perhaps it’s because we had time to build rapport and trust, establish a routine and an intellectual space in which we can learn together and from each other. I am looking a little anxiously toward the fall semester, hoping that we will be able to return to a real-life classroom, bringing our walking and talking bodies but leaving our bedrooms behind, for I don’t really know how build new relationships with people when they meet me only as a fixture in front of a bookshelf.