Yesterday, I looked back a bit on the kids’ experience of school during the pandemic. In the process, I reminded myself that I haven’t done the same for my pandemic education experience, though we wrapped up classes for the year a few weeks ago. That’s also probably worth a look backwards at what did and didn’t work.
The pandemic year really covers four academic terms at Union: the Spring 2020 term, which was fully remote, and then the three in-person-with-restrictions terms this year. Each of these was weird in its own way; I’ve already written about the fully-remote term over at Forbes, so I won’t repeat that in great detail. The short version is that I was lucky to be teaching a two-week module of a science course for non-majors, so I set the whole thing up to be fully asynchronous: pre-recorded video lectures at the students’ own pace.
This past Fall, thanks to some scheduling quirks, I was again doing only a two-week module of a team-taught course, this one our first-year seminar class. I pre-recorded video versions of all the lectures– you can watch them on YouTube if you’d like— but only as a back-up in case we were forced to go fully remote again before my turn came around. The actual class got in-person versions of these lectures, albeit with masks and distancing requirements in the classroom.
In the Winter term, I did a team-taught class on Quantum Computing with a colleague in CS. This one was in a full hybrid format: we had a handful of students who were remote only (two of whom were in Asia), so all the lectures had to be screen-shared on Zoom. We also had a couple of weeks of “campus quarantine” when case numbers spiked briefly, and we moved the course online.
My Spring term course was the Integrated Math and Physics class, another team-taught class, this one covering the E&M part of intro physics, and the vector calculus portion of intro math. It’s a heavy lift at the best of times, counting as two courses, and I probably shouldn’t’ve agreed to do it, because that’s also the heaviest term for the administrative responsibilities I had as Director of Undergraduate Research for the last four years.
Taken all together, this ended up being weird even by the standards of this weird year– in the Fall, I was barely on campus, only teaching in-person for two weeks and otherwise staying home. Then in the Spring when everyone’s nerves were maximally frayed, I was on campus all the time, which was Not Fun. It’s also a year somewhat lacking in feedback, as two of the four terms (last year’s full remote and this fall’s seminar) involved classes that we didn’t do traditional course evaluations for, so I don’t really have a way to judge student response.
What did we learn from this? Well, mostly that teaching on Zoom kind of sucks. I at least have the benefit of primarily using PowerPoint/ Google Slides for my lectures, so I didn’t need to work all that hard at making the classroom whiteboard visible to remote students. Projecting them in the room in Screen Share mode doesn’t detract much, and the remote students can see almost everything the in-person ones do. It’s extremely difficult to provide a good interactive experience for a hybrid class in this form, though, and both of us teaching Quantum Computing got absolutely killed on the Winter term evaluations around that.
Even for full-remote classes, in-person was vastly better than Zoom: the classes were way more engaged and interactive. There’s just no way to know, in a Zoom lecture where you can only see maybe a handful of thumbnail images of those students who have their cameras still on, whether a concept is clicking with them, or whether a joke landed. It’s a completely different experience, and not a terribly pleasant one. Even with everybody masked so you could only see eyes, it was a lot easier to read the room in person than on Zoom.
The primary positive lesson I took from this experience was that I like Zoom for office hours. I have a real gift for choosing times for my office hours that coincide with other classes my students are taking, so I always struggle to get anyone to come. On Zoom, though, I can schedule an office hour in the evening, at a time when I’m not willing to come to campus but am not really doing more than counting down to bedtime at home, and students actually come to that and ask questions. (It helps if it’s the night before the homework is due…). And if nobody shows up, well, it’s just a matter of having a Zoom window open in the corner of my monitor while I do the same puttering around on the Internet that I would’ve been doing anyway.
A small secondary lesson is that it’s relatively easy to make not-all-that-high-quality class recordings by doing slides on Screen Share in a Zoom meeting with nobody else in it. I may start doing that somewhat more regularly for the benefit of students who miss classes for good reasons (illnesses or extracurricular events), so they get more than just a PDF of my lecture slides. I don’t think I’ll offer it as a synchronous option, though.
One final comparative note: as I said in the post about the kids’ school, I think we had it way easier than the elementary, middle, and high-school teachers did. I certainly did, since my teaching load was relatively light (in recognition of the large amount of service work I was doing as Director), but even people who were teaching more had the ability to limit their time on campus in ways that public school teachers really don’t. And my college faculty colleagues had the option to teach in whatever format they wanted– some fully in person, some fully remote, some hybrid– which, again, the public school teachers mostly didn’t. My kids’ teachers had to be there all day, every day, and they all had to teach hybrid format the whole time. The elementary teachers had half their class in the room, and half on Google Meet every single day, but the other half was at least in the building, using the local network. The middle-school teachers had half their class in the room, and the other half God knows where, using God knows what kind of Internet access.
This is not new– college teaching is always easier that high school teaching (which, for the record, is always easier than elementary school teaching, he says as the son of a man who taught sixth grade for 30-odd years). But those differences were magnified during the pandemic– we had it harder than we usually do, but things got even harder for the teachers handling my kids’ classes. As I said in the earlier post, it’s hard to overstate how much we owe them for that.
To sum up, when we had our two commencements in mid-June (one for the class of 2021, and a second ceremony for 300-odd members of the class of 2020 who came back to get the chance to walk across the stage in person), a lot of parents said things like “I bet you learned a lot this year…” And that’s absolutely true– we had to pick up a lot of new techniques and technology on the fly, and that involved a lot of learning. But as I said to all of them, these are lessons that I fervently hope never to need to use again.