Remote-ness

I meant to be more frequent with my postings, and… well, that didn’t happen. But I find myself with a fair amount of time while being mostly confined at home, waiting to hear whether the sore throat and sniffles I had were either COVID, strep, or just the common cold (it’s luckily just the cold, what a phrase I never thought I’d be saying). So, a brief reflection on my last couple of days.

Having to go through the whole hullabaloo of remote classes - telling my students, arranging my screens at home, figuring out whether my audio was going to play because of course this is the week my classes are chock full of audio demos - just reminded me of what life was like when people were frantically putting all of their classes online last year. I wasn’t sure whether to have students contribute in the chat or to have them unmute and talk, I didn’t know how much time to give for people to type responses, and I had no idea whether my demonstrations were working because I had no facial expressions to read (as a general rule I just don’t ask students to have to turn their cameras on). It was a reminder of how detached people can feel in that experience.

For some people, this has been their reality for well over a year. It hasn’t been mine, and in one sense I am very grateful that it hasn’t. The experience of the past two days has reinforced for me a lot of the joys of being together in a classroom with my students - the ability for them to easily bounce ideas off of each other, for them to self-organize into groups seamlessly, to be able to quickly correct misunderstandings. I think I’ve been taking these experiences for granted, and being stuck at home has been a timely reminder to me of what a blessing it is to be with students. Not that you can’t do this remotely, and I believe many educators have done so throughout the pandemic with a skill and aptitude that I admire, but my sudden and unanticipated shift to remote teaching for two days highlighted for me the difference very starkly.

The other thing about being remote at these times is the relative uncertainty of when you’ll be back. Living the last few days with symptoms that could be any form of transmissible illness, knowing that it has implications for the people I was with over the last few days, is a very unsettling feeling. There was this visceral relief I felt when the COVID test came back negative, because it meant that I could go back to the classroom, back to the office, and feel a sense of normalcy again. It was a microcosm of that feeling people have about the pandemic as a whole, wondering whether life was going to come off of being on hold. But as some of my students have observed, if we live our lives as if they are on hold, expecting that we will get that time back, we will realize that we will have just lost the time we spent waiting.

Being remote has in one sense made me feel very detached from the things in my life that have brought me joy. But at the same time, it has helped me appreciate those things, and that even now there are the things that I can still find joy in - my students’ comments and questions in chat, a video call with a loved one, a quiet time for prayer. It has been a time for me to sit back and see the ways in which my life has changed since the last time I was doing a remote class, to really say that yes, my life has moved in this past year in ways I never thought it would.