Remote Teaching #isanyonethere

When faced with the transition from lecture-style teaching to remote learning in the wake of the Corvid-19 induced global quarantine, I had my doubts and bi-weekly night terrors. The days leading up to it were something straight out of the multiple zombie pop culture essays I have read examining the science, the psychology, and the societal symbolism behind The Walking Dead. Oh, and FYI AMC and Kirkman, I had to stop watching because Negan’s ability to make a joke out of everything reminded me too much of my father. So, yeah, #obsessed #nowdepressed.

Anyway, every day it seemed a bit of normality was hacksawed to death: college dorms were evacuated, grocery shopping became a militarized activity, and McDonald’s-esque drive through testing sites began to sprinkle the landscape. I remember sitting up in my office and watching various news sites and occasionally checking to see if Twitter had shit itself, thinking I better start contemplating the upcoming zombification of the three-tiered educational system and brush up on my Blackboard skills.

Blackboard is the program used by many colleges to teach online courses. I took a refresher seminar and used the two-week mandatory shut down to prepare to move my kind of half spastic and sometimes manically existential lectures into educational clickbait.

In the beginning, it seemed like it would be a pleasant experience, considering I now could sleep as long as I wanted to and for someone with my specific depression symptoms that, in the long run, turned out NOT to be a good thing. I think my students were experiencing a similar level of pre-mature jubilation. A few weeks in, they began to disappear into the smoky wastes of the Ethernet. They simply were not logging on to do their work every day. They just expected that it would all turn out in the end when they turned their final drafts of their research papers into the almighty and unmerciful TURN-IT IN, a program meant to collect and detect plagiarism in academia.

My most significant problem was not being able to get a feeling for their writing styles because they didn’t do the regular assignments. Also, this only ramped up the extremes to which they tried to cheat me out of a proper research paper. I saw students try to translate documents in other languages to throw me off track. The usual running of the bullshit-free/paid paper websites was extra bloody this particular semester. And then, there was the unknown factor of who was writing the papers. They were now forced into proximity with the possibility of helicopter parents that could argue about William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Still, they could not understand the concepts of proper punctuation and citation.

I guess everyone was hoping that this would be easy because the aging millennials and incoming iGen were used to and often preferred, all their knowledge to come from their phones and laptops. However, this was not the case. As much as we like to believe these generations are plugged in, they are not. They still need us. This is a fact they will never admit to, but it has become painfully apparent to the professors and teachers they used to ghost via cellphones, tablets, or laptops, pre-quarantine, under the guise of “taking notes.” Oops, did I just spill the real tea? Sorry guys and gals, every educator knows you do that. Plus, nobody’s crotch is that interesting and gives off iridescent blue light.  

It is not just my observations I am using. I have witnessed many educators and parents in multiple social media feeds, addressing their frustration. The New York Times reported, in an article aptly called, “As School Moves Online, Many Students Stay Logged Out” that, “even before the outbreak, chronic absenteeism was a problem in many schools, especially those with a lot of low-income students” (Goldstein et al.). So we were already going into this with strikes against us. Then, they went on to illustrate that in the Los Angeles district, one-third of students failed to log in at the end of March and the beginning of April. According to the Slate’s, “Not Everyone Can Write Off a School Year,” Melinda Webber Moyer quotes John B. King Jr., president, and CEO of the Education Trust and the former U.S. Secretary of Education when he states, “The impact of this COVID-19 crisis is going to be felt most profoundly by the students who are already most vulnerable.” Moyer explains, “These include children with disabilities and children who rely on schools for essential services such as counseling and crisis support.”

As previously stated, some students need real “face time” and structure. They need the routine, and they need us live and in person. It is a fact and a well-understood concept in teaching that there are different types of learners out there. There is no way remote teaching can cover the spread.

Now, different programs are used to try to stop them from cheating, but students can be very inventive if there is an incentive NOT to do something. I saw one meme where a student was told that if they open any windows while taking a test that they would fail. The joke of it was a cleverly placed second computer used to cheat. Also, there are programs like ProctorU, which via webcam, can observe the student while taking his or her exam. I’ve seen student memes with cleverly placed notes on the screen below the camera. Its official people, we are now in an educational arms race.  

They need the real-life threat of us stalking around the classroom. It’s archaic, but students see us and equate us with an actual risk to their GPAs. We aren’t something they can pause, re-do, or re-wire. The truth is, we mimic mommy and daddy, and everything else they have come to equate with doing the right thing. A tornado doesn’t look that threatening on a computer screen, but when it’s right outside your door, you tend to take notice and get your shit together.

The semester wasn’t a total bust. Like I tell my students, everything is a process. I learned what worked, what didn’t work, and some new ideas to try moving into the next part of the summer term. I hope to see my students IRL in the future, I miss watching them face to face in groups, I miss their sense of humor, and I even miss repeating myself like a coked-up parrot. As a writer, I used to love observing them and writing down their quirks, mannerisms, and personalities to cook up some wild characters and funny poems. I think I genuinely miss my creative writing students the most. They were always more animated, and I would watch them create pieces right in front of me that I would imagine getting published one day, and I could say I knew them back when they first started. 

So, if you are not an essential worker, please stay home and practice social distancing! We need to get over and well past the Corvid-19 pandemic because students need us back in front of a real blackboard.