COVID: My Classroom
I do not make my classrooms, as many primary and secondary teacher do. I do not decorate them, put up pictures, posters, or student work. I do not buy classroom supplies from out of my pocket, eat at the desk, or use the classroom as a meeting space with students. My name is not on the door. So, to say “my” classroom, or to even speak in the singular of a particular room, is both misleading and profoundly true. The classrooms in which I teach in a given year, even classrooms in which I have taught in the past, are in some sense “my” classroom, just as my interactions of students in these rooms are my memories (and theirs). Classrooms, in education-speak, are physical spaces that over time become abstract. I am thinking of phrases like “the Humanities classroom,” “beyond the classroom,” or “the flipped classroom--or sentences like, “She is great in the classroom.” For me, then, “the” classroom is both is both a real space, filled with furniture and students, and something bigger, where individual instantiations merge into something that might be described as a structure of feeling.
Any given classroom is in a strict sense only “mine” for a while; towards the end of class, even before my allotted time is over, it is quite common to see the door knob turn as students from the next class signal that they are waiting. And there is often an attenuated and sometimes awkward moment of exchange, where the teacher from one class logs out of the tech, gathers (and sometimes drops) papers, and talks to lingering students as the teacher from the next class stands by, eager to claim the podium, push buttons, define the parameters of her own space. It is this very turnover and exchange, with all its messy rituals that turns all classrooms into “my” classroom. Passing by them as I often do, I sometimes glance through glass walls or half-open doors and feel a sense not so much of ownership, but of familiarity; these are places that I know, whether I have taught in them or not. In the old days before Covid I would stand in the hallway, perhaps waiting for the elevator or just taking things in. I would idly watch students listening intently, wriggling in their seats, or looking at their phones. Since my office is in the foreign language building, it is possible that even if I could hear snatches of what the students or teachers were saying, I would not understand it. Still, I would look, and the world would seem legible: “this teacher has a beautiful voice” I would say to myself. “These students seem engaged.” “The tech in this room is hard to use.” “How can I do with groups what this teacher seems to be doing?” “Wasn’t that young woman in my Victorian novel class?” “The student in the back is about to fall asleep.” Running through all those questions was a deep feeling of identification, with the teacher, the student, and the classroom.
1
What I pass today is not my classroom. Although the door says the “COVID occupancy” is 12, there are only two students in it, one in the back, and one in the front. They are as far away from each other as the seating allows—much more than 6 feet. The students are, of course, masked, as is the instructor, who is standing behind a plexiglass shield speaking through layers of cotton. I do not see the promised contact-free microphones hanging from the ceiling that should direct sound from the front of the room to the back, and to remote students. The microphones may well be there; I cannot see everything from outside despite the glass. Classrooms are private public spaces; I do not want to be obviously looking as if into a proverbial fishbowl. I do not want to be seen adding one more gaze, mediated by glass, metal, and cloth, to the layers of distance that constitute this classroom.
At the front of the room is a giant screen on which I can see, angled a little bit away from me at the threshold, the faces of some ten or twelve students, unmasked. The teacher, I can see, is struggling not to turn her back on either the screen or the students in the room. I know from my experience of online teaching that these “remote” students on the screen may well be in different time zones, that if they are far enough away from Houston they might have stayed up all night to join this class. This classroom exists at a confluence of temporalities; students whose days and nights are marked by academic time—the early dinners and late nights of campus life, that, however modified still structure campus living. It also brings together what I can only call different dimensions—two in the case of those on screen and three, for those “fully” present. The bright line for me as I watch is not between screen and classroom—although that is powerful. It is the difference between the masked and the unmasked; this is a distinction that oddly enough, makes the students on screen in some ways more present than those whose faces are covered. I think about the Western preoccupation with faces, and Western discomfort with, for example, women who choose to cover theirs.
As I watch, one of the faces freezes on the screen, flickers, and becomes a black square with a name on it. The in-person students do not disappear in the same way, although I suspect some of those registered in person have stopped coming to class.
2
This is not my classroom. Down the hall, the scene is livelier. In this room I can see that there are more students, but I cannot count them all since they are spread out beyond the horizon of my vision. This glass wall gives me a good view of the teacher. He is standing, gesticulating, using the vertical and horizontal space in the front of the room and ignoring the plexiglass shield in front of the desk. His gestures are the large arm movements of my beloved genre of Victorian melodrama, associated with an acting style in which theatres were too big and poorly lit for the subtlety of closeups. He mimes excitement, interest, steps slightly back to invite commen to draw the students in. Their gazes follow him as he advances and retreats. I hear his voice through the mask, recognize that he is speaking English, cannot hear individual words. When the students speak, I hear a soft sound more like an interruption of other sounds than a noise made by an individual. I know from conversations with colleagues that it is unlikely the students can hear each other. I am transfixed by the plexiglass shield. Unlike the ones from the University of Georgia which became internet memes, this barrier is not amateurishly taped together. It stands squarely in front of the teacher’s desk, higher than most people are tall. This was the detail in our “return to the classroom” plan that made me feel almost safe enough to teach in person until I learned more about the possibility of aerosol transmission. In person it looks oddly insignificant; a neat transparent rectangle that serves as a reminder that teachers do not routinely sit at or stand behind a desk when they talk to their students. I give up on the plexiglass and turn away, as my colleague moves further across the room.
3
This is not my classroom. At two o’clock three of the four bigger classrooms in the building are completely empty. This is a little puzzling, since I have understood that, given restrictions on class size, rooms were in high demand. I enter the classroom in which I taught a recent Jane Austen class, where every Tuesday and Thursday I would wait impatiently outside until the previous teacher let me in to rearrange the chairs into discussion mode, and move heavy table in the front that squeezed me back towards the electronic podium. I think of those students, all of whom have graduated, picture their faces, see them sitting solidly in the awkward little chairs with attached desktops. After class, the chairs would always be a little twisted, as students levered themselves out of them, or turned to each other during class. A student, excited by an idea or passage, might hitch her chair forward. Almost every time, one or more students would leave something on the floor: a water bottle, a backpack, sometimes a copy of Emmaor Mansfield Park, but never, at least in my imagination, Pride and Prejudice. These objects littered the floor like allegorical items in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. What did they represent? I am not sure. Perhaps the carelessness of the young, the pressures of student life, the detritus associated with fully occupying space?
In this empty post-Covid classroom, the chairs are neatly arranged around small square tables, as if for an Austen-inspired but historically inaccurate garden party. In their exquisite neatness they tell me that no one has sat in them since the room was cleaned—early this morning, or perhaps longer ago than that. The floor is innocent of water bottles or books; I can see the nap on the carpet left by a vacuum cleaner. For some reason, despite the fact that the classroom has emptied itself into a public space, I do not enter. I stop at the door, at the threshold. Partly, this is a fear of aerosols, of a lingering something that students who seem never to have been present might have invisibly left behind. Partly, I feel like an interloper; the emptiness has erased my history in the room and my right to be there.
4
This is not my classroom. I walk to another building where the department office is and climb the stairs to the second floor. I will not use elevators, although I have seen lots of evidence that they are safe. I need envelopes from the mail room. Just before I get there, I pass the room I (along with many of my colleagues, no doubt) truly think of as “my” classroom. This is the English seminar room where almost all graduate courses and some undergraduate seminars are taught, where many department and committee meetings take place, where I show films to students at night, or read aloud numbers of serialized Dickens novels. It is a place where many of us routinely break the “no food rule” and where I learn that a student is vegetarian, or gluten free, or loves cupcakes.
This is a room, that comes to a point like a prow of a ship, its window jutting out onto the inner campus loop. On windy days, you can see tree branches moving and hear them groaning like the ocean. The room is stuffed with things that make it feel cramped: a large seminar table surrounded by bulky chairs, an elaborate podium setup. Two enormous whiteboards, one on each of the side walls. It is by no means a perfect classroom. Because we often used it for classes bigger than twelve in those pre-Covid times, there is a second tier of chairs behind the ones drawn up to the table. Nothing I was ever able to do as a teacher could completely eliminate that feeling of uneven access, even when I had people switch places. The most uncomfortable and cramped seats are the ones at the back of the room, which I always thought of as the front of the ship. These are by the window and the projection screen, so students who come late to class inevitably have to settle for these, climbing over their fellows, and their water bottles, backpacks and books. If this ship-like room were a plane, we would not be allowed to take off—there is nowhere to stow anything. The two whiteboards are temptingly large, but if you write on one, the students in chairs on that side of the room have to turn their chairs to see what you have written. It is impossible to have students write on the board because getting there is so hazardous. The screen—which, remarkably, almost always descends when you want it to—is a problem for those students forced by the contours of the room to sit close to it. If I were one of those students sitting four feet from an enormous image I would be seasick.
I can write of this last room in present tense, because nothing has happened to it. I was told it was declared too small to use during Covid and retired from the registrar’s list of classrooms. Preserved in the amber of the pandemic behind a locked door, in an odd way this classroom is to me what it always was: the place I learned to teach better graduate seminars, the room where I once yelled at my colleague during a meeting, the place where I have shown “Clueless” to undergrads so many times, I have, like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, memorized all the parts without being able to act. My classroom, the singular one, has been retired, making all other classrooms mine in a new way.
Perhaps, as I write this, I will learn not to say “mine” and “my” even as I feel the power of these words. I realize that one of the things I love so much about classrooms—real ones with numbers like Herring 326 or Rayzor 123—also belong to others: the students who come early or make abashed entrances 15 minutes late; the previous instructors who leaving their intriguing scribbles on the board; the colleagues who wait outside the door, eager for their turn to teach. I also share the room with my own past classes, some taught years ago and remembered—fondly or not. These are ghosts in the classroom—mostly friendly ones—that help me to learn as I teach.
I don’t know, in the parlance of universities in the time of Covid, when I will “return to the classroom.” I think I will wait until it feels more like a return, when the classroom is no longer an abstraction but once again a place, my place.