I'm
in the second week of teaching remotely, and I'm flabbergasted by the
challenges. I've been teaching over 30 years and there aren't a lot of
situations that surprise me. Nonetheless,
these are odd times. Most of my students are from Asia, and learning
their names is a challenge for me every year. This year, though, it's
even more challenging. I have one class with 36 students, and while that
won't last forever, it's really hard to keep track of everyone. Today I
started taking notes on my class list, but that only makes me recall
people at one extreme or another. It's the Great Middle I'm worried
about.
As
if that's not enough, I'm experimenting with the technology. I've
figured out how to use Zoom breakout rooms. They work fairly well when I
put students in pairs, but when I tried groupwork today they were a
total failure in not one, but two classes. Sometimes I come into a room
and see all avatars, with absolutely no one talking to each other. Other
times I come in and hear really animated conversation, but in Chinese.
Now
I can't really blame my students. If I were sitting in China and the
teacher grouped me with native English speakers, I'd probably lapse into
conversation in my native language. In a classroom, if there were a
teacher jumping around, I might be more careful. In Zoom, though, you
don't actually see the teacher. In fact, you don't even get a warning
he's coming. You're just there, having a grand old time, and he appears
out of nowhere. That's not really fair, is it?
Last
year was quite different. I'd been with the same classes over six
months. I knew everyone's names. They all knew just how crazy I was. Now
I'm with a bunch of kids who have no idea who I am, and what's more I
have no idea who they are either. Will I be able to find out? I'm not
sure. For example, I have one student who's heavily into cosplay. You
could tell who she was every time she walked into a room. On the
computer screen, she looks like you or me. If I hadn't known her
previously, I'd be missing out on a huge part of her character.
Today,
two students told me they hadn't been in Google classroom. This
explained a lot. Now I know why they hadn't done any homework, and now I
know why they haven't been participating. What I don't know is how they
found my Zoom classroom, because I informed all the students where it
was on Google Classroom. The thing is, when you have a class of 36,
things like that tend to slip through the cracks. In fact, with a class
of 36, a lot of students slip through the cracks, likely more than in an
ordinary classroom.
From
everything I hear, conventional live classrooms will be no walk in the
park either. Now that the chancellor has backed up on insisting magical
teachers would appear out of nowhere, no one knows where the blended
hybrid teachers, the ones who will teach those other kids missing from
your classes, are going to come from. I'm happy to be a remote teacher
and not worry about that, in addition to everything else.
The
mayor, of course, is absolutely confident that everything will work
out. He was absolutely confident school would open on the 10th, and
absolutely confident school would open on the 21st. Now he's confident
school will open next week. I wonder what exactly he'll be saying in
October. I was at a meeting this morning in which multiple chapter
leaders commented their schools didn't have enough teachers. I'm very
happy that our school came up with our own plan, one in which actual
teachers teach their actual students and we don't have to worry about
who teaches them when we happen to be elsewhere.
This is going to be a very interesting year. I don't know about you, but I can't wait for things to get dull once again.
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