Teaching Online Week 2 : the highs and lows #MOC19
I miss my students. I miss the energy of being in a classroom with them — yes, even the five p.m. Friday evening class when I know most of my students would rather be making a start on their weekends.
I don’t miss spending eight + hours a week on the commute, although I do miss listening to podcasts and audio books. I don’t miss wearing makeup.
I am getting waaaaaay too used to wearing yoga pants. I knew I was in trouble yesterday, when despite having a full closet with plenty of other options, I did laundry because all of mine were dirty.
Still, things went a bit better with distance learning this week. Firstly, because I’d followed another professor’s advice, and put everything into weekly folders on Blackboard. I record short lectures using Kaltura Capture, which is excruciating because I hate the sound of my own voice — one of the many reasons I’d never make a good politician. Readings, lectures, and assignments — or what I call Read, Watch, Do — are all in the weekly folder, which becomes visible to students on Sunday at 5pm. Everything in the folder is due by 11:59pm on Friday evening. This way, most of the learning is asynchronous, so that students who are working or have kids and are homeschooling as well as trying to get their own work done can do it when convenient.
Nonetheless, based on some polls of my classes, there are some students who need that check in with their peers and professors. So even in my management writing class, which had voted for asynchronous learning before the shutdown, I’m offering them a totally optional check in via Zoom once a week — 15–20 minutes to ask questions face-to-face.
I’ve also been trying to check in with students that I know have a lot going on outside of school. A second student emailed me to say their parent had been diagnosed with COVID-19. I worry for my students. They’re young, and dealing with so much right now.
Before the start of my classes that meet for an actual Zoom class session once a week to discuss readings, I ask how everyone is doing. One student works at a grocery store, where they aren’t provided with anything in terms of protection. She is scared, because she needs the job, but doesn’t want to get sick. Another student works at a nursing home, and they are short of masks. I worked in college, but I didn’t have to worry about catching a potentially fatal virus while I did it.
One of the highlights of this week was discussing George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language with my Craft of Writing: Form and Inspiration class. I’d recorded a mini-lecture for them to watch beforehand, highlighting two quotes in particular:
I asked them to try to find current examples of how political speech and /or writing is being used to try to defend the indefensible.
To kick things off, I talked about the Orwellian term that was common in our political discourse when I started as a columnist for Hearst back in 2003: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. I told them how U.S. news sources would refer to those techniques as torture when other countries were doing it, but fell in in line with the Bush Administration to use that obfuscating phrase when America did it. The euphemism did have the effect of corrupting thought. When I wrote a column criticizing our use of waterboarding in light of America being a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, I was called a “terrorist lover.” One woman wrote to me saying that it couldn’t be considered torture because “it’s only water and it doesn’t leave any marks.”
Orwellian indeed.
I love teaching Politics and the English Language and seeing how it makes students think and view political language in a more critical way. When I told my students that I wish that everyone were taught it before they were allowed to vote, they thought it was a good idea, too.
As we roll into the weekend, I’ve got lots of grading and prep to do for next week, but so I don’t forget it is the weekend, I’ve got a Zoom Happy Hour scheduled for tomorrow, and Zoom afternoon cocktails with my high school friends on Sunday, after our 40 year high school reunion in August was postponed till next year.
Let’s hope we all survive to celebrate our 41-year reunion.
This is the first in a series of diary posts as part of Mass Observation Covid-19, (#moc19) being organized by Vance Briceland. Read about the project here.
