Remote Semester

In the time before the pandemic, a semester was 13 or 14 or 15 weeks, and each week had seven days in it, with one, two, or three meetings for every class. This rhythm was as familiar to me as sleeping and waking, as eating dinner in the evening, and watching baseball games on tv most days of the summer but not always on Monday and Thursday. This rhythm was part of my body, intimately entangled in my coffee drinking, my waking and sleeping, my standing and sitting, my walking to and from work.

At the beginning of the fall semester, after office hours, say, or a department meeting, I would walk in the under the trees to the parking lot where the path would give way to concrete shimmering in the heat. By the end of the semester, the same walk would take place at dusk; I would pass lighted windows in the still warm evening air. In the spring the process would reverse as, walking to the car, I would meet the onrush of spring on the wind, the air thick with scent and the pathways with oak pollen.

This was one arc of the semester, the one having to do with season, and light, and temperature. There was also another arc--bigger or smaller depending on your point of view. If it were the semester that I was teaching my spring undergraduate Victorian novel course, the time of year and the time in class would be roughly parallel, the novels lengthening as the days did. As time passed from August to December, I would move from 1811 (Pride and Prejudice) to 1871 (Middlemarch) traversing 60 years in four months. Over the years, as I taught fewer books in the course, time slowed down. As I passed the dorms on the way to my car, I would sometimes imagine my students reading or not reading, travelling or not travelling along the arc of the syllabus. For me, Pride and Prejudice will always be associated with the cold and the dark of January, even though much of the book takes place in the suspiciously benign summer of much British fiction—even those books written, as Austen’s were, during a “little ice age.” The second novel I tend to teach in that class, Jane Eyre, opens with the declaration that it is too cold to go for a walk. This might be a fleeting moment of thermal synchrony; my students and I might, in a brief Houston winter, be reading the novel looking out the window at a chilly landscape. Mary Barton, a novel about factory work, captures the rhythms of accelerated labor just as we put the clocks forward. Middlemarch, after 30 years in Houston, signifies to me jasmine and the end of spring, although the scent that permeates key scenes in the novel is that of roses.

My best ideas about the books and about teaching came to me, in the before times, as I walked that familiar route; when I was in a hurry and took the campus bus to save time, I found that I was not getting anything done any faster. It was during the walking that I planned my discussion topics, honed in on passages or class goals, thought of a way to encourage a student who was struggling with the material. This semester there is no walking. In the morning, I get up and go to my desk which my husband built for me at the beginning of the lockdown. Sometimes I traverse the five feet between my bed and desk before coffee, and sometimes after, but the space and time between work and not working has contracted. 

On my desk are three screens arranged, like Goldilocks’ bears, according to size: the giant monitor purchased halfway through the semester when I realized I was having trouble seeing my students’ faces; the laptop that powers the monitor and mirrored it in miniature, and the iPad which, as a colleague explained somewhat mysteriously, “should be a participant in class.” As I log into Zoom early to see if Rice learning platform has inexplicably forgotten my password or dropped the link from my “scheduled meetings” list, each screen flickers to identical life. Each features a blue square in which there is a picture of two of my dogs swimming, as it seems, towards the viewer in the bluer water of my pool. They have rubber bones in their mouths and embody the enthusiasm I hope to feel by the time class begins. My students like the dog pictures and ask about the originals, who are most likely lying on the still-warm bed behind a non-virtual screen. I am a little embarrassed when it becomes clear that the pictures with two dogs represent only half of the canine population in my home, and one third of the total number of pets. Somehow the exuberance of animals—not to mention the sounds they make during class—feels awfully public. At the same time, I wonder if replacing the two-dog picture with what I feel is an even cuter one of three swimming dogs will somehow offer my students more---more enthusiasm, more excitement, more to look at.

Not enough dogs, perhaps, or too many novels. I drop one from the syllabus after the winter freeze that cancels class for a week. Even so, many of the students are struggling to keep up. I have some experience with this phenomenon as a perennial teacher of very long novels. I am used to students having a hard time with Bleak House. I have never been sure exactly why, although I have in the past assigned class reading journals to help me figure it out. The most frequent complaint was that there were too many characters, the second that Dickens used too many words. These objections—deeply felt-- would make sense if the final novel of the semester, Middlemarch, did not have as many characters, as many words, and (by my informal count) as many long sentences. 

Before the pandemic, I worried that my class might be too much, over the years reducing 12 novels to ten, then to eight, and finally to six. Now, teaching remotely, I worry both about “too much” and “not enough.” It is the “not enough” that inspires the three screens, the dogs, the multiple software platforms. Fearing the not enough, I also go, in my own mind at least, “over the top.” I am not usually the kind of gal to wax eloquent about the beauty and moral profundity of literature, although I have always made an exception for Middlemarch. Since I taught the end of Paradise Lost as a graduate student—the part where Adam and Eve “wend their solitary way” out of Eden—I have not wept in front of a class. Now I tear up reading the (many) death scenes in Bleak House, even the ones, like Richard’s, about which I care nothing and that I sometimes forget to include in the list of the novel’s fatalities. I ask myself why I am crying.  Am I performing enthusiasm? Traumatized by the pandemic? Empathizing with my students, who are almost all it seems, completely overwhelmed? 

Too many novels, too little time. Everything I do in class takes longer even though there is less discussion than usual and I have experienced relatively few technological problems. I beg the students to break the rule of Zoom etiquette that has participants mute themselves unless they are speaking. Unmuting takes precious time and raises the bar to participation. When I share my iPad screen to show text, it seems to take forever to broadcast, even though the timer on the software helpfully demonstrated time and again that the process only takes three seconds. I speak more quickly than is necessary, especially towards the end of class when I sometimes do what I have prided myself on never doing—I “run over” the time when class was supposed to end. When a student gently informs me that I have done this several times, I panic. Am I turning into one of my own undergraduate professors who mansplained their way over the sound of bells? I had thought that the temporalities of teaching—50 minutes, 75 minutes, three hours-- had somehow been inscribed in my body. Now, despite three digital clocks on three different screens, I had droned on. Surely the change in class scheduling from 50 to 55-minute periods had not completely undermined my sense of time? I realized that the problem was not so much time as space. Without the sound of students from the next class buzzing around my classroom door, without the shuffling noises students in my own class make as they reassemble their backpacks for a quick exit, I am clueless. Tethered to the more sedentary temporality of home, I could have gone on forever.

There are, of course, more important distortions, elongations, and compressions of time. Two of my students are taking the course from China.  One appears in class at what for her is midnight. The other tried this schedule for a while, and decided to depend on recordings and a weekly extra class meeting during her morning and my evening. Students more than a few time zones away have been experiencing a form of Second Shift Syndrome, in which being temporally out of sync with their environment can have negative cognitive effects and make them physically ill. Early last semester, my husband watched, fascinated, as the sun rose over the shoulder of one of his students filling her square with light.

Then there is the little matter of students not doing the reading on time. I pass out a carefully extended reading schedule for Bleak House, and it is received—as far as I can tell-- with polite skepticism. A few students keep up or even forge ahead. The others maintain a dignified silence, even during the ungraded quizzes at the beginning of each class in which students compete for Victorian-themed prizes. In past years, the promise of embarrassingly adorable Victoriana—a mug, a bookmark, stationary or even food bought at our local British store--was just enough to get most people to read. This year they respectfully decline. Class attendance is still great and the students rarely deploy their avatars or the “black boxes” so dreaded by remote teachers. But the “speaker view” on my Zoom reduces the class to about six when I am sharing text, because only six students speak. I stop screensharing almost entirely so I can at least see the faces effaced by text.

The semester seems too long but not long enough. I share with the students a hunger for ending, but I also desperately need more time to do what I feel is a responsible job. These are the usual cross-temporalities of pedagogy, the push and pull of temporal desire, written large in a time of disaster. The last class coincides with my full vaccination; I actually go to campus to teach, although I do it remotely, from the front porch of my office building, protected, although not entirely, from a blinding rainstorm. I have made and brought brownies because this is what I normally do and I want normalcy. They are real brownies, and people can come after class and eat them if they feel comfortable. Seven students stop by; five of them, and another undergraduate who is a friend of one of my students, sit under the porch at an only slightly damp table. We talk together for an hour and a half. There is suddenly time and it has something to do with place.

Eventually, almost all of the students read at least one of the two last novels so they can write about them. The papers are, by and large, very good. I have given them until the last possible day to hand the papers in and they have taken their time.