Teaching with Zoom: A report from the front
I didn’t think I’d like teaching with Zoom. I’ve taught pretty continuously since I was about 15, always very parttime, and I’ve relished interactions with students, like those triumphant moments when you’re wrong and they’re right. The half-course I’ve taught for eons at U of T, Culture and Media in Canada — and a summer school version that got caught this spring in the COVID-19 web — is built around Harold Innis’s eccentric idea that the Oral Tradition was the first medium, and his preference for it over successors like the Written Tradition, print, TV and the internet.
So I was surprised and delighted (versus shocked and appalled) by my first experience with Zoom, initiated into it, inevitably, by my kid, a McGill student. I didn’t anticipate the intimacy it allowed: the side-by-sideness, close-ups with nuanced facial expressions. It was like doing TV interviews. You don’t have to raise your voice or project, as you must in large classes, which are more like theatre. Zoom felt like one of Martin Buber’s intense I and You “encounters.” It had potential.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way. My first Huh? Moment came when most of the class didn’t put themselves on visual, so I was faced by an array of boxes with names on them. That was unexpected, it’s very unlike a live class. It stymies your sense of what’s going on moment to moment. In “real” classrooms, even when students say nothing, they react, you can see them engaged, repelled, bored — and respond with a nod or comment. You can encourage them individually or change the whole course of the session.
Teaching’s like acting or performing in that way. But on Zoom, students often chimed in without showing themselves. I tried urging them onto visual, enthusing over the live visible presences of the oral tradition, but was reluctant to push. I dislike overt exercises of authority. That may reflect my own student experience in the ’60s, though I prefer thinking of it as the Socratic method. And I can see their reasons, like grooming issues in COVID times, or privacy issues about letting people “into” your home — though at one session, I found myself almost unlocking the front door before the students “arrived.”
I was also ambushed by the chat (versus mic) function, which of course isn’t actual speech, it’s text. I don’t think of text as speech, but the young do. Texting is routinely called talking. Chat also helps students join in who may feel awkward speaking up — so that’s good. Innis might’ve lamented chat as a regrettable victory of the written over his beloved oral — or that may just be my own Star Trek background kicking in. Kirk never texted, “Beam me up,” to Scotty. His “communicator” didn’t do texts.
(Note to self: gotta learn to pick up and incorporate those chat comments. Build them into the flow, sliding back and forth between written and spoken.)
These wouldn’t register as problems if you weren’t somehow aiming to replicate the live classroom experience, perhaps even improve it, online. But maybe that’s not the goal. It appears that the live/synchronous model — i.e. like a “real” classroom — only applies to around 20 per cent of course work done online post-COVID-19. The rest is “lonely” work, like preparation or assignment completion, making it weirdly like old-tyme “correspondence” courses.
And yet. There is an intimacy that elicits personal questions. (“How’d you and your kid work on that book together?”). Also a boldness and willingness to challenge, perhaps boosted by the relative anonymity of not being seen.
I’m also a surprised and gratified that, as someone said, “the students would clearly rather be in class than online.” They haven’t been successfully propagandized the way students were in the earlier days of the internet: told it was the “greatest invention since the capture of fire,” and that they were lucky to be living through the most momentous changes in history.
This cohort has witnessed the corporate buccaneering of Facebook, Amazon and the rest. They’re less impressionable than their precursors. Yet they remain idealistic, in a skeptical vein. There’s even a kind of hanging around after class phenomenon — on Zoom — that I can’t quite describe.
There is an intimacy (on Zoom) that elicits personal questions. Also a boldness and willingness to challenge