My One Year Anniversary of Zoom Teaching

March 8, 2021, marked one year since Barnard College announced we would be teaching remotely, using Zoom. I knew this was going to be especially challenging for me. I’ve got a disability when it comes to technology. I’m just differently wired. When I got my first computer in 1984, I experienced anxiety, particularly when I ran into a problem with saving (or losing) work. When I got my first smart phone, I worried I’d never be able use it. My son laughed. “Mom! This is not rocket science!” Ever since I was young, I’ve tended to expect the worst.  Anxiety dwells in the body, and it flares up. So when we suddenly had to go virtual, I worried I wouldn’t be able to use Zoom. I mean, it’s been a year and I still sometimes mess up my screen sharing. 

Okay, admittedly I’m not technologically savvy, but maybe it’s just not important to me. I grew up driving a stick shift, and liked it. I’ve never needed a smart car to drive better or a smart classroom to teach well. All I have ever needed is an interesting text (withn the pages of a real book to hold), my mind, my mouth and students equipped with books and inquiring minds. I won a teaching award in my ninth year of college teaching and two more in my twenty-fifth. I think my teaching is still as good, if judged by the joy in my classroom, student evaluations, which I’m happy to say are positive, and other successes. Maybe it’s even gotten better during this time of our plague.

For years, I always try to keep growing, stretching my mind intellectually, much as I try with the pilates I do for my body, working against the downward pull of gravity and age. My interests and reading now extends beyond seventeenth-century England into later centuries. And in America as well, as I think about writing a book on the history of biblically-based Exceptionalism, which became even more evident throughout the “Make America Great Again” phenomenon, bolstering far-right extremism and Christian nationalism. 

The same instinct for learning goes into my teaching. I rethink my courses every time I teach them. When I moved more than sixteen years ago from the University of Illinois to Barnard College, I threw practically all my folders of teaching notes away, filling a huge recycling bin, shocking my two graduate students who were helping me. Now, I’ve been forced to start over again, as my office at Barnard with all my files has been inaccessible because of Covid-19 restrictions.

But even as the use of Zoom and virtual teaching has presented such obstacles to me, I’ve actually enjoyed the challenge and it’s been far better than I thought possible.

I knew that I’d not be able to do fancy things to keep my students engaged, so I thought, what do I do best? What is my particular gift that I can give? Older literature can be imposing in “normal” times, and soon we face curriculum reviews that threaten to get rid of early period requirements for English majors—the very courses I teach. So for some years, I’ve been thinking about how to make students feel connected to older literature by John Donne, or John Milton, or Katherine Philips or the Quaker Margaret Fell, writers who lived in a different world as well as a different century. Can I figure out how best ensure they’ll pay attention with the added layer of “distance” learning?

 When I started to teach at the University of Illinois, I was 25, only a couple years older than my students. I felt I had to maintain a “professional distance” to have authority. But not these days. My students need to feel connected to me as well as to the literature. The human is central to the humanities. In my courses, I provide an historical perspective but also ask the class to think: How does the present condition of the world, our society, our divisive political climate, change the way we read these texts and the significance we find in them? Each session has become a process of intellectual (and sometimes personal) discovery, both for myself and for my students.  

I have worked to create a special sense of community in my virtual classroom. Will they care about this older literature, if they don’t think I care about them, particularly when they are all feeling interminable stress, isolation, and worry about their future, or if they even will have one? A sense of community is necessary, but challenging when we don’t meet face to face. It is as important for me as I’m sure it is for them.

Some colleagues at other colleges tell me they cannot require students to be visible on Zoom. But how can you have a community if you can’t “see” each other? So, I ask my students to all turn their video on, and if they have a problem, to tell me (though they don’t have to explain). It has worked, even in a class with thirty-some students. Several have remarked that they like “seeing” all the faces in my class, whereas in a “real” classroom they saw only the profiles or backs of the other students, and nothing of those sitting behind them, unless it was a seminar. My students talk to each other in my virtual classroom (e.g., “following up on Annie”)—in chat too-- far more than they did in “real” classrooms!

Maybe it’s also my personality. I’ve never been the arrogant “sage on the stage.” I don’t have too many filters (even on my language!). I’m very open and that gives them permission to be themselves too. I tell them, feeling sad, or anxious or just unsettled is normal for abnormal times. And I let them know that I feel those things too. I remind them that we are here to make the best of every day, every class, to feel that we have taken a step or two forward together, discovering things we hadn’t known that are important.

They tell me that I create a “safe” space—they can say anything in my “room.” My only rule is respect (Aretha Franklin had it right). Some students tell me our class is the high point of the week. We really like each other, and we all learn.

They are doing amazing work, whether in my senior seminar on Intolerance, Tolerance, stories of Resilience, or in my Enlightenment Colloquium. In both courses, we have been exploring issues of liberty, toleration and its limits and exclusions, both in the past and now. Class discussions are sometimes exhilarating.

For their papers, I encourage students to follow their interests, whether they are distinctly literary or involve doing original research on conspiracy theories, the history of the Pledge of Allegiance, and the ways church and state remain intertwined in America. They are doing work I don’t think I could have at their age. They discover a sense of purpose, at least for the moment, and so do I.  

Will I go back to my old way of being in the classroom once we are no longer remote? I’m not so sure. It will surely be a new normal, but not the same old, same old.