{"id":1273,"date":"2020-04-18T11:05:24","date_gmt":"2020-04-18T15:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/?p=1273"},"modified":"2020-04-18T11:05:24","modified_gmt":"2020-04-18T15:05:24","slug":"thoughts-upon-having-reached-four-weeks-of-zoom-teaching-by-neil-baldwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2020\/04\/18\/thoughts-upon-having-reached-four-weeks-of-zoom-teaching-by-neil-baldwin\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts Upon Having Reached Four Weeks of ZOOM Teaching \u2013 by Neil Baldwin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday, March 23, the first time I saw my seventeen freshman seminar students\u2019 faces arrayed on the screen, each in her or his little rectangular box, I laughed, and said, \u201cYou all look like Hollywood Squares!\u201d They stared back at me, blankly, the retro cultural reference having sailed right over their heads; and, of course, I didn\u2019t blame them. I\u00a0 moved on to the subject at hand. A couple of days later, I asked how everyone was doing \u201con a scale of one to ten\u201d \u2013 there were a lot of 5\u2019s and 6\u2019s \u2013 that was about as high as anybody dared go. We began talking about the assignment. About fifteen minutes in, I realized I was speaking very loudly and slowly, enunciating as if in a foreign language, as if they couldn\u2019t hear me \u201cthrough\u201d the screen; and leaning forward, literally on the edge of my ergonomic chair, ankles twisted around the base, legs tightening up; the back of my neck beginning to ache, and my shoulders, and I reminded myself to take a deep breath. I turned the screen slightly to the left so they could see the window of my study and some books on the shelves, and told them I was doing this, and there was perplexed response. One day the following week, I went around the room, or \u201cZroom,\u201d as I fancifully called it, picking on one boxed-in person after another. Occasionally, they would forget to unmute and start talking in silence. One young woman, sitting on her bed, who looked as if she hadn\u2019t slept much, bunched up a pillow, leaned her head down, pulled a blanket up to her shoulders, and slowly closed her eyes. I decided to let her sleep — and so did everybody else in the class. \u00a0At some point during week three, I found my glance more and more often straying down to the lower right, where the time was displayed, and realized I was preoccupied with how much energy I was deploying per minute, and that It felt like twice as much as I was accustomed to put out during \u201creal\u201d class time; I mentioned this epiphany to the students. They all nodded simultaneously — \u201cIt\u2019s not the same\u2026<\/em>,\u201d somebody said, from a far corner of the rectangle — and I had to stop and ask who had just spoken, because I was listening to someone else, which meant I could not look at anybody else. \u00a0A few days ago, all anybody wanted to talk about was how \u201cstuck\u201d they felt, \u201csort of cut off,\u201d and that some professors, on the assumption that the students had so much more time on their hands, were \u201cpiling on more and more work and assignments\u201d and that was \u201cstressing them out,\u201d etc. etc. \u00a0This morning, it got to the end of the period, one hour and fifteen minutes had passed by, the discussion had been substantial and it felt good to me, like we were finally getting into a groove — and I was moved by this realization, and couldn\u2019t help blurting out to them that it was a tough time, and that I was here for them, knew what they must be going through, and not to worry, one way or another, we would make it together through the rest of the semester. \u00a0\u201cThen what?…\u201d somebody, somewhere, called out. \u00a0Back in the other reality, a mere month ago, I would have looked at my watch, announced that the class was over, then waited as they put laptops and notebooks away, packed backpacks, put coats on, talked about where they might go to eat, and then file out of the room in small groups, saying \u201cgood bye professor, have a nice day., see you next class\u2026\u201d \u00a0This time, I said, \u201cOK, everybody, I will send the Canvas prompt soon, and I’ll see you on Thursday.\u201d<\/p>\n

I saw my image wave to them, and their images waved back.<\/p>\n

Then I clicked \u201cEnd Meeting for All,\u201d and they vanished.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Monday, March 23, the first time I saw my seventeen freshman seminar students\u2019 faces arrayed on the screen, each in her or his little rectangular box, I laughed, and said, \u201cYou all look like Hollywood Squares!\u201d They stared back at me, blankly, the retro cultural reference having sailed right over their heads; and, of course, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":1275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[87,82,85,84,26,20,86,83],"class_list":["post-1273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-director-s-essay","tag-communication","tag-corona-virus","tag-freshmen-students","tag-higher-education","tag-media","tag-pedagogy","tag-professors","tag-zoom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1274,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions\/1274"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}