First semester reflections

One thing that I have found about my experience of this pandemic that perhaps isn’t as commonly discussed is the relative discomfort we can have in silence. Perhaps it’s just me (although I don’t think I’m alone in this), but the time I spent with friends, doing extracurriculars, and doing ‘busy work’ on top of doing actual work kept me from actually reflecting on my experience of life. When the pandemic came and took away a lot of those things I would do to fill an empty space, I didn’t want to be in silence. I do think this is just an exaggeration of what I’ve known about myself for a long time: I listen to music when working or commuting because I don’t like sitting quietly. And part of it is that I don’t want to spend time facing things I did not-so-well (or heck, even things I think I did well, because then I notice all the parts that weren’t so good).

Self-reflection is very important for growth. It opens the opportunity for us to look at our experiences through a different lens than the one we lived in that moment, perhaps in a more constructive way than the experience was first lived. So in the interest of promoting regular self-reflection (if you don’t already), I thought it useful to share my own in longer form. This will not be exhaustive, but I intend to be transparent in my thinking.

I want to start off by saying that I don’t want to romanticize teaching in a pandemic. It is absolutely not, for several reasons: even if your course was originally designed to be taught online, there are a myriad of external stressors that make the situation hard for students and educators. I happen to have a number of conditions favouring my ability to focus on my job (mainly that I live alone and have no dependents), which I think lets me paint a rosier picture of my experience than someone else would have in my situation. And despite what I say below, I want to emphasize that this was still hard, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Teaching has always been a learning experience for me. Whether it’s content that I’m barely familiar with or stuff that I know like the back of my hand, there’s an element of discovery each time, like discovering something new or funky about the way your fingers bend. But in looking at this fall semester, it feels less like discovering something small and more like I’ve changed the lenses in my eyes or something - a paradigm shift, perhaps. I’m seeing things about teaching in a new way, and I’m not sure whether to attribute it to me starting a new job or me teaching in a global pandemic, so let’s attribute it to a bit of both.

On the practical side, making slides and planning rubrics for two courses concurrently was a series of deadlines that I don’t think I’ve had to meet for a very long time. I look back on that now and I wonder about just how much time I was really putting into this process that could have been done in less time. When people ask me how much time to gauge for preparation for a lecture for the first time, I say that my rule is to plan to prep at least five hours per hour of lecture, but I definitely think I went way over that. Perhaps it was first time jitters and really wanting the content under my thumb, but I don’t think I would have been able to survive if I had included any more lectures! But each time I was sitting down to try and think of what I’d talk about in a given lecture, it was fun to plan. Of course, I still include way more than I can actually cover. (I’m working on that, I promise.)

My students were champs. I think I had it a lot luckier than most people when it came to making a switch to fully virtual classes for two weeks (and then switching back to in-person classes); it was incredibly smooth. Their willingness to engage and their adaptability to the circumstances was a really big help for me in managing this semester, so I really want to commend them all for being patient with me in a way that was constructive and kind. It shouldn’t be this difficult for everyone, but a silver lining is that I found myself continually inspired by my students to do better, and that wasn’t being taken away despite the pandemic. I know everyone has had it hard this term, but hats off to the students for resilience in this situation, and their vulnerability in communicating with me when they were having a hard time.

One thing I downplayed a lot when I first considered teaching at a university as a job prospect was the capacity for empathy that one has to have. Perhaps this was because I didn’t feel particularly attached to my own professors when I was an undergraduate student, but it would have been a deeply alienating feeling to be so detached from my students this fall semester. On the one hand, it was very hard to have the energy to face the difficulties that some students would report having; this would have been the case in a non-COVID environment as well, but the pandemic only exacerbated things. On the other hand, connecting with students made for an openness in learning, and it was remarkable to see the ways in which students were taking the things discussed in class and tying it into experiences of daily life. On top of that, learning about the campus life (even the ways in which it’s a bit different this year) has been very rewarding, because I can see that it matters a lot.

The practicalities of teaching in a COVID classroom presented small but significant differences. Keeping track of students attending remotely divided my attention. Small group discussions were often with the same group of people because students couldn’t move out of their seats. Wearing masks meant I didn’t have as good a sense of students’ facial expressions as I would have liked - and I didn’t realize how much I relied on them to gauge classroom engagement! Even just remembering to mute the classroom when students were presenting audio from their computers was a bit of a headache each time. And those each on their own are small things, but added together it really challenged me. It often left me feeling like I had made a mess each time I left the classroom, never mind the actual content of the class itself. That’s a lot of mental energy drain.

Despite all of this, I have to say that I have taken a lot from this situation. The importance of fostering a communicative classroom is especially important in a situation where our ways of getting additional information through gestures are taken away from us. I have incredibly helpful colleagues who have really been empathetic with the situation and gone out of their way to help me, even when they have their own burdens to carry. Honestly, don’t underestimate the power of a regular check-in with a colleague - as a new person, I’ve really appreciated it, but I think we all need that more than ever now whether you’ve been at the job for a few months or many years. And when I’m looking at the feedback and thinking about how I can improve on what I’ve done without despairing over the process of revision, I do think that it’s a sign I’m in a profession I truly want to be in.

Teaching in a pandemic sucks. It also happens to be the affirmation that I’m in the right place for me right now. Moving countries to start a new job was not an easy decision to come to, even though I had prepared myself for that likelihood a while ago (long before the prospect of COVID was ever on the horizon). After sitting back and reflecting on everything I did go through, despite feeling very tired a lot of the time and constantly struggling with impostor syndrome, I feel settled and hopeful where I am. I’ll take that as a plus.