{"id":207854,"date":"2020-04-09T15:29:30","date_gmt":"2020-04-09T19:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/?p=207854"},"modified":"2020-04-09T15:29:30","modified_gmt":"2020-04-09T19:29:30","slug":"adventures-in-zoom-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/2020\/04\/09\/adventures-in-zoom-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventures in Zoom-Teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roger the \u201cbearded dragon\u201d (aka pogona, aka lizard) was quite taken with James Joyce.\u00a0\u00a0 He was particularly moved by the famous final paragraph of \u201cThe Dead,\u201d as were Pumpkin, Maria, Charlie, BooBoo\/Salem, Fred, and Lil Pete, other pets of students in my Irish Revival course.\u00a0 You can see in the zoom-picture how eager the animals were to discuss the story\u2019s ambiguities.<\/p>\n

I miss our classroom with its beautiful view; I miss the immediacy of connection possible when my students and I are face to face, and all the semiotic signals given by students\u2019 posture and body language are visible. \u00a0\u00a0And I miss the wonderful women in Venture Caf\u00e9 who make the lattes and cappuccinos: Christine, Nicole, and Lisa.<\/p>\n

What remote teaching offers, however, is another kind of intimacy, views of our private spaces and their books, pillows, posters, pictures, and pets.\u00a0\u00a0 It also offers a sense of triumph, the knowledge that with the quasi-miraculous aid of technology we\u2019ve been able to continue the discussions we started in January, even though we\u2019re far apart.<\/p>\n

In my other class, Women Poets, the distance was even greater, over three-thousand miles, but the intimacy was still there.\u00a0 My students had been looking forward to meeting Irish poet Colette Bryce, whose poems we had studied for two weeks.\u00a0 But we were all sequestered in our homes, so Bryce couldn\u2019t meet us on campus, shake everyone\u2019s hands, and sign copies of her book The Whole and Rain-domed Universe<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 To overcome the obstacles of the times, however, we held a remote poetry reading (sponsored, like other non-remote readings, by the Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professorship).<\/p>\n

\"phot
Poet Colette Bryce remote poetry reading.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We saw the poet\u2019s own living room in her house in Newcastle, Northumberland, England, as she read the poems we\u2019d discussed and then answered questions for almost half an hour, just as she would have in our non-virtual presence.\u00a0\u00a0 We also heard her doorbell ring.\u00a0 And finally, we got to view the inspiration for one of her poems, a terrifying rubber bullet picked up from the street after the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings in Derry, Northern Ireland.\u00a0 \u00a0Bryce walked over to the shelf where it rested and carried it across the room to her computer\u2019s camera.\u00a0 That direct, or almost direct, confrontation with an object that is part of political history and literary history had a force greater than PowerPoint could convey.<\/p>\n

The photographs that accompany this account of teaching by Zoom don\u2019t include all of my students, but to those few people left who haven\u2019t experienced Zoom, they will convey the small rectangles through which students and professors relate to one another these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucy McDiarmid, Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":207855,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-57_english-department","category-7_homepage-news-and-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207857,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207854\/revisions\/207857"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}