You Can Stay Home Again

It is not lockdown but it feels like it. It is not quarantine, but it smells like it: the familiar aroma of morning coffee growing fainter and more acrid over the course of the day; the olfactory substrate of Lemon Pledge, face lotion, and steam from the dryer overlaid with perhaps with the just a whiff of dog. You are home again all day.  Your university has told you that you will be teaching remotely for two weeks. As you read this email, you mentally cross out the “two weeks” in the email and substitute “for the duration.” You do not ask yourself, because you cannot bear the answer: “for the duration of what?” Last year, and the year before that, you had opinions about this kind of homing: at different moments you approved or disapproved of university decisions to go remote; you wrote an op-ed for the student newspaper about the horrors of hybrid teaching; you wrote a long email to the Emergency Management team asking that they produce educational material on differences among types of masks. Now, it seems, you have no opinions: the idea of writing an email, much less an op-ed, exhausts you. As you write “no opinions” you realize that this is not quite right; you have a lot of opinions, but many of them conflict. If you can summon the energy, you will someday write about this. You are not, right now, writing about whether it is right to go or stay remote, but about how it feels to be there, how it feels to be here at home, teaching.

It has been 8 months since you last taught a formal class on Zoom, although you have had Zoom meetings, some with students, almost every day since the end of classes last May. You spent the fall largely in your administrative role, which involves, among other things, planning. You have overseen the planning of the curriculum, of public events, and programming. The fall was also the culmination of four years of what you have submitted to calling “strategic planning.” Planning in the pandemic is something like setting up a house of cards in a windstorm, but worse, because often you are the one taking down the cards you have so carefully stacked up.  More than half of your work is undoing what you have already done: you and your staff have become experts at cancelling things from flights to restaurant reservations. You actually boast about these skills in letters of invitation: “Of course, we will revisit the question of an in-person visit closer to the time. Regrettably, we have become skilled at translating in-person events to an online format. “Rooms for visitors in pleasant hotels or funky b and bs have disappeared into the internet where you made the reservations; talks have been pixelated into webinars; bodies have been translated into images on a screen. Perhaps because you love food and eating with people so much, you spent months trying to compensate for what cannot be reproduced online. For a while, you tried parallel eating and drinking, dutifully bringing a glass of wine or a cup of tea and a plate of snacks to a period you designated as an “afterglow,” honoring your mother-in-law’s late-in-life gentleman companion who was a Mason, which somehow resulted in parties and parties after them. Oddly, the drinks and the snacks, quite delectable in and of themselves, became, in this context, as tasteless as if they had been digital, as flavorless as if your body and the bodies an on the screen had no real existence. This is the Barmecide feast of the Arabian nights, the anorectic buffet, the miming of what cannot made digital. If you erase the body, it will come back to you in the form of exhaustion.

What remains real, what remains bodily, for you and for your staff is the labor involved in doing and undoing. Every event comes with its own digital shadow and with the work of translation, where the work of unmaking is infinitely more tiring that the work of setting up. All the dispiriting work is made possible—and, it seems, inevitable—by hope, a hope that takes the form of a fantasy calendar. Surely, you say to yourself, two weeks from now, next semester, in 2022, we will be able to have our gatherings, our spirited interpersonal exchanges, our stuffed mushrooms and our warm white wine? And now it is two weeks from now, it is next semester, it is, improbably, 2022 and it is once again time to cancel and transform. On bad days—and there are more than a few—your calendars (paper, digital, imaginary) begin and end with “never.” Your Distinguished Alumna will not get her award in person; your retired board chair will never have valedictory drinks with the steering committee, your students in the capstone will never be able to present their final projects to a real audience. You are living in the duration. Living in and for the duration means living and working at home. 

You and your students together keep alive the fantasy that remote teaching is temporary: several students, in fact, speak of the two-week period of remote teaching, approvingly, as a “transition.” You look at your syllabus and think that perhaps you should have marked January 24, the day we might go back to in-person classes, in red.  Since January 24 is a Monday, and your classes are on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the date does not appear anywhere on your syllabus, but you feel its power. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “I will be teaching in person by the time I have to show the film version of Sense and Sensibility?” You and your TA prepare, just in case, for showing clips in the “Media Gallery” tab of Zoom, where, history suggests, we will experience problems with both the audio and the visual.

 For two weeks—or more—you must teach by going to the desk in your bedroom. The desk, pandemic-built by your husband, faces, in accordance with Zoom wisdom, a window from which you can see the tiny vegetables and giant roses of your backyard. The desk supports three screens not counting the phone you keep on hand for urgent calls to IT: your laptop, a large monitor, and you iPad, all of which you need for every class. The laptop acts as the computer for your monitor. Without the monitor you would have a hard time seeing the “gallery” of faces that represents your class. The iPad is signed into your class as a second version of yourself. You use this smaller device to more easily access a shared screen—for example a Kindle version of the book you are teaching or a diagram you have painfully and inexpertly created in Word. Since there is no way of muting the shared screen function on the monitor, you must choose between seeing all the faces in the class and sharing your screen, between the text and the students. Sharing the screen gives you a vertical or horizontal strip of a few faces—since these appear there as students speak, you only see the most talkative ones when you are looking at a text. Quiet students are, accordingly, invisible.  

Much of your energy the past few years has been devoted to replicating on screen something you have taken for granted since you started teaching more than 40 years ago: the blackboard, or in more recent days, the whiteboard. A non-virtual classroom will almost always have at least one of these. You remember how when you wanted to write a word, you would pull out a piece of chalk or an erasable marker and, it seems incredible now write that word on a board. If you wanted to, you could write many words, and could quickly easily draw the relation between them with lines. You could circle important words. Crucially, you could ask students to contribute words, either by shouting them out for you to write or by approaching the board themselves. You could also draw on the board. Because you are not an artist, the drawing would likely be bad, but it would almost always be recognizable. Your students would laugh at you, perhaps comforted by your incompetence. They could also laugh at you for not being able to reach the top of the board; a student, taller than yourself, might offer to write things down above your head. “Board work” as teaching manuals apparently call it, has always been central to your pedagogy; it honors student input while allowing you to see patterns, to give the input a shape.

Zoom patriots insist that all these things can be done remotely. You can, for example, write words in the chat function, although you cannot arrange them. If you are skilled with text boxes, you can insert words one by one in a Word document, but you cannot place them directly in any but a sequential pattern. Although in a real classroom you find silence fertile, germinal, even “pregnant,” you find the time of clicking and dragging in Word to be a complete waste of time. As the students watch, you fumble, fingers thick with stupidity. You watch the clock counting down on your multiple screens and think about how you are running out of time in this slowed-down molasses pedagogy.

There are always additional programs your colleagues in teaching support recommend. The best of these for your purposes is Google’s Jamboard that allows students to fill out colored stickers and you to arrange them. Pages in Jamboard, though, are small; as more people contribute, stickers begin to overlap. And here is always the problem of access: in every Jamboard class there is at least one student who cannot, for some reason, get in. Fixing this problem takes time, screen time, class time. Jamboard has, however, provided me with some euphoric moments, most notably when I asked students (between classes) to upload pictures of locations in Jane Eyre. There were some breathtaking pictures by visually talented students, in particular a gorgeous colored sketch by Maggie Yuan of Jane’s four poster bed from which the heroine receives  a mysterious command from the moon to flee temptation (see thumbnail). But even the sketches that looked more like those you could have contributed—stick figures on benches, the occasional stylized tree, flower, or turret--made you realize that, in a real classroom, Jamboard would have its uses. You have long known that it is important to take advantage of students’ different skills: some are artists, others actors or historians, or can explain the etiology of Victorian diseases. Jamboard allows you to move from text to image, allows all of us to see and read differently.

In the quest to produce a board, some people, of course, simply use a real whiteboard behind or just to the side of them; you remember the time you used the unexpectedly large one you had  delivered from Amazon, which crashed into your background trifold that you and your son fashioned, not very well, out of a blank canvas divider and peel-and-stick William Morris wallpaper, causing it to fall over and to reveal your unmade bed with dogs on it and a view of the open bathroom door. Fortunately, at that moment, the divider screen hit your web camera and ring light, causing a complete blackout. Unfortunately, the audio was undisturbed and the reassembly was accompanied by manic barking. It was a true Wizard-of-Oz moment, and you felt keenly that you were the Wizard, the con-man, the emperor without clothes—or with clothes strewn everywhere.

Of course, the board is only one problem that gets in the way of what you experience as good teaching. Only yesterday, you experienced a new problem: even when you muted one or both of your devices, they started emitting strange noises, first chattering and then shrieking. The dogs joined in with their own noises—it was hard to know which to try to silence first. Like the board problem, the sound problem has profound effects on the structure of the class community: it means that the TA will have to be responsible for showing clips, thus turning her as long as the class is remote  into tech support when you and she would like her to focus on content and ideas.

Teaching “remotely,” of course, also means teaching at home. It does not feel “remote” to move from your bed to your desk, to clean your “classroom” or to (try to) train your dogs not to bark when they hear you say “hello” to a class as they would when a guest comes to your front door. They cannot tell that you are remote, and in a sense, neither can you. Remote pedagogy is, finally, domestic pedagogy. Despite, or perhaps because, everything takes place through devices, students are in a sense guests in your home as you are in theirs: the pixels are not only pixels but chairs, pets, children, beds, artwork—and in the case of one of your students who is deeply into home décor—elaborate paper or plastic garlands of leaves. There is an intimacy there—in many cases an unwonted or even an unwanted—intimacy that belies the technology that produces it. You prefer, you have always preferred, intimacy with your students to take other forms, to be structured by ideas and it turns out finally by classrooms.