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Dull 'my-job-is-good' Tweet, but y'knaa what, online seminars aren't that bad. Sure, you can't quite reach the same level of nuance (or attain it for long), a fact of not being able to mutually register subtle face movements/body language, but all told I've found them to be good.
I think what is a slog is the four back-to-back across a day. Seminars 2 & 3 are invariably the best: my performance and quick eradication of earlier weak links means these slots are optimal, but then that was more or less true FtF, too. Zoom burn is definitely a thing, though.
And I think in future we'll look back at online teaching with a solo monitor as true Dark Ages stuff. Referring between multiple Word Docs, slides + various browser tabs means there are inevitable lags, which I tend to foreground to the students. The 6pm Netflix window opening
Is also a problem, but we can't stop our neighbours getting their David Rose fix, can we? Breakout rooms: mixed success, though again I think this largely emulates the FtF variations - i.e. any given student's natural preponderance (or not) to talk/whether they've previously
Actually done the reading or not, &c. Delay between switching in and out of breakout rooms is an annoyance, but overall I think it works for now. I've heard the phrase 'placeholder' (and equivalents) used to describe the current online set-up, and I broadly agree that that's what
We're doing as teachers at the minute: holding open space, facilitating some 'normal' for 90 minutes; for the crumpled paper-ball of time-since-March to be levelled out again briefly. My feeling from these young people is that they're eager to be having intellectual discussions
And to be engaging with new ideas, texts and having lively debates with new peers. The fora in which that happens is of course of concern to them (and us), but less so I feel than what we can give them: patience, guidance, a platform. After All Of This (if, indeed, there is to
be any straightforward return to The Before Times [I doubt it]) I am certain that we will have a cohort of students brimming with ideas, passion and enthusiasm. I realise this is not the most pedagogically astute assesment you're likely to read, but there we gan. One more thing:
I do miss campus: walking through it; the way light catches the buildings at dusk; then that dichotomy between feeling physically tired yet intellectually nourished isn't quite the same when you're not walking to Haymarket at dusk, perhaps nipping into the Hotspur for a
cheeky one with a colleague between the day's last seminar and, say, an evening poetry reading (but in truth, as a new dad, such occurrences had become fewer & further between). Anyway, here ends a banal sermon on teaching English Literature on the eve of lockdown 2.0.
