School has been in session a few weeks now and let's just say that online learning is interesting. You might already be feeling the onset of that Zoom fatigue. You might have no idea what's going on with your classes. Or you might be living with a noisy roommate or bad internet and finding it difficult to get through your classes undisturbed. If this is you, we are here to say this again: you got this! We got this--and seems like our professors share the sentiment. Since the last 'From Your Professors' post was so popular, I once again asked some of our beloved professors to share their thoughts on online learning and offer some words of encouragement. We hope reading this spurs you to look forward to your next class, to understand that we are all in the same boat and trying to keep it afloat, and to reach out to your professors for help or to simply let them know that their efforts are appreciated. So here are some of the awe-inspiring responses from our awesome professors:
"Back in April 2020, I was scheduled to teach the 2010 novel Room on my Canadian Literature survey course. I’d chosen this book because it’s a brilliantly original work that happens to have been written right here in London, Ontario, by Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue. In 2015, it became a widely celebrated, Oscar-winning film and had recently been adapted to the stage in a play that would premier at the Grand Theatre during the last weeks of classes. What a great way to end the term! Students could attend the play and in class we could engage in a discussion of the different adaptations.
On Wednesday, March 11th my daughter and I, as well as many of the students in my class, attended a preview of Room. There had been some talk of a virus that was circulating, but I don’t think it occurred to any of us that we should be uncomfortable sitting in a crowded theatre. Later that week, of course, the play’s North American premier was called off. As was the case with dramatic productions all over the world, its run was cancelled and the theatre closed. By Friday, Western University had shut down too, and our class went online for the remaining weeks of term.
As we sat in our respective basements and closets and kitchens in front of our computer screens, working away in the final weeks of the course, I’m sure it was not lost on any of us that Room is a novel (in its first half) set in the rigid confines of a single tiny space, where its two protagonists are held hostage for years. Indeed, the novel’s narrator Jack, a five-year-old boy, has at the beginning of the story never left this room. He has spent his whole life in this limited area, and his Ma, despite being traumatized by her captor, faces the daily challenge in that dismal situation of stimulating his growing mind and body, of helping him feel valued, of making his life fun and interesting, even when she reaches the limits of her own resourcefulness, energy, and patience. She makes a single room into a world of wonder, beauty and love.
In these circumstances, it is hard not to read Donoghue’s novel, with its motif of forced confinement and familial intimacy, as a parable for the strange times in which we find ourselves. Ma’s situation certainly rings true for parents who have experienced the world’s longest March Break. When they finally emerge from their confinement, Ma even has to teach Jack about social distancing: “we don’t hug strangers. Even nice ones,” he says. Emma Donoghue very kindly sent our class a recorded message, in which she talked about the value of creativity to transform space, connect people, and make difficult circumstances bearable. As Emma noted, Room is about confinement and isolation, and the power of imagination, play and love “to overcome some of the miseries, to turn a hell into a heaven.” She shows us that “creativity, books, plays, the arts, have a power to connect us and to keep us going through the hardest of times.”
I was thinking about all this as I waited nervously for the students enrolled in my Film class to log in and pass through the virtual waiting area on their way to our Zoom classroom for our first virtual meeting on Wednesday of this week. A student name appeared on my screen in the Zoom waiting room. I tapped the “enter” key and admitted them to the class. A face appeared in a box on my screen. Another name appeared. “enter.” Another new face. Then, more names and more faces. In this moment, I experienced some things Donoghue’s Jack missed during his imprisonment: the anticipation of meeting new people, the expectation of sharing ideas, the eagerness to connect personally and intellectually. I mismanaged the technology. Well, naturally. My internet was unstable. Par for the course. Several participants couldn’t get access at first. We figured it out. Some students appeared only as names on the screen. That’s ok: they were present. For all the nerves and glitches and bugs in the system, we opened the door on a new room. enter."
-Prof. Manina Jones
"Dear students,
Several of my colleagues have given you advice and encouragement about taking courses virtually. They remind us that class time allows us to come together as a community and they emphasize our resilience in these strange times. Perhaps some of the negative effects of the pandemic on our mental health and physical well-being can be mitigated by re-committing to our shared goals of educating ourselves.
As someone who studies the humanities, and has staked my living and my personal happiness on this pursuit, being together in a room for class has been the one thing that reliably energizes me. At this time of year, I’m usually anxious about meeting all my new students, excited to see former students in the hall or to stop by my office and looking forward to knowing my current students better every time I see them. This week I’m trying to appreciate that my students are attending class in their small picture boxes.
Some spark is missing. Our presence to each other and to the intellectual work of a class is aimed to train, but it also surprises. This is how class becomes an event. The ritual of listening and understanding turns spontaneous with your insights. To a smart observation or analysis I will blurt, “Say that again!” The spark has ignited. I’m trying to replicate the lived experience of class on synchronous Zoom, but I’m also observing how and why it falters.
I miss you all, but meanwhile I can accept the pretense and do my best as I wait for us to be together again."
-Prof. Mary Helen McMurran
"We’re stuck with the Zoom classroom for now and we need to figure out together what it means to be human and to learn about the humanities through our screens and technologies. The flip side of “emergency remote teaching” is emergency remote learning. It’s very hard to learn in an emergency yet it is also a powerful experience and there is so much to learn. I cherish the classroom every time I step in it – at the least, the pandemic has reminded us of the wonderfulness of being in class.
In terms of practical tips, I can suggest the following: Make good use of the unique features of Zoom, like the chat box. Schedule at least one visit to Zoom office hours per semester with your professor and your TA (so few students visit office hours in person and they are missing out – in office visits you can ask practical questions about how to improve as a writer or broader academic questions about the methods of literary study and career choices). Always be writing – I call everyone a creative writer whether they are writing poetry, essays, or Twitter posts. Now is the time for more writing of all creative and intellectual stripes. But since it is hard to focus on Zoom and type at the same time, consider hand-writing your notes during the Zoom class. Take your notebook everywhere – sometimes in that 5 minutes waiting for friends or class to start a great idea flashes up. I noticed this little act of graffiti in my neighbourhood park that offers good words to live by: “do your part, stay ap create art!” But – stay apart too!
What I really want to talk about is the bigger picture of living through a pandemic. We are in a historical moment – we are living in a time when history is being made on a daily basis in accelerated fashion. Living in history-making times is not always fun; often it is quite painful. We all recognize we are in a major historical moment and the whole world has changed.
I remember back to one clear moment in my life when I distinctly felt history being made. My first day of being a graduate student was on September 11, 2001. I listened to the radio that morning and heard about an explosion at the World Trade Center in New York. I went to class that morning and by the end of the class we knew that the world had changed.
I do think a lot of good can come out of our own experience of living through a historical moment right now – even as we recognize the tremendous stress and burdens we are sharing in personal health, family duties, economic anxieties, and also as we rally to build on anti-racism efforts across our school and our communities. I have been asking students at the beginning of class to answer the following question in a breakout group: what seems possible for the first time – good or bad – because of the pandemic? I have heard a wide variety of answers: we can enter a bank with a mask; we can wear PJs to class; we can attend class from anywhere in the world. My own answer: this is the first time in my lifetime that I have seen the whole world come together practically overnight – not for reasons of war or defense – but to take care of each other on a planetary scale.
There is a quote from the often-controversial philosopher Slavoj Žižek that I find poignant. He’s talking about how frequently we hear from cutting-edge technology companies the claims that we can do the impossible right now. We can colonize Mars, make nanobots to repair our organs, perhaps even soon upload our consciousness into the Cloud and live forever! At the same time, when people ask for a world just a little bit nicer and fairer than the world we have, we are told that is impossible: “You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich; they tell you it’s impossible [because we] lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you ‘impossible; this means a totalitarian state.’ There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare.” Citation: Slavoj Žižek, “Don’t Fall in Love with Yourselves,” Occupy! Scenes from an Occupied America, eds. Astra Taylor, Keith Cessen, and editors from N+1 (London: Verso, 2011), 69.
What seems possible for the first time is that what we were told was impossible – a kinder, more caring, socially and ecologically just world that we just couldn’t really afford – that turns out to be very possible. Our classrooms, virtual and in person, are a good place to start."
-Prof. Joshua Schuster