What We Lose When We Go From the Classroom to Zoom
Like other utopian dreams, the fiction of equality has its value.
When life was normal, my students and I gathered in classrooms.
My favorites are the small intimate ones where we face each other around a seminar table and conversation flows easily. Midsize classes meet in a square room with windows along one side. Around this time of year it becomes unbearably hot in the afternoon, as the spring sunshine streams in. My students slouch drowsily in those uncomfortable chairs with built-in desks, arranged in haphazard rows, while I pace at the front of the room, trying to arouse their interest in some arcane anthropological subject. Sometimes I’m successful. Introductory classes are held in a large lecture hall, and from my vantage point at the bottom of the room, I see rows of students fanned out neatly before me. I recently started wearing prescription glasses so I could distinguish their faces, which were beginning to smudge together as a result of encroaching middle age.
Each type of classroom presents distinct challenges and pleasures, but they all have one thing in common. In these classrooms, students meet one another as apparent equals. They sit in the same chairs.
Now we have lost our classrooms and, I fear, something vital along with them.
At the entrance to the building on the Queens College campus in Flushing, Queens, where I have taught for 14 years, I am greeted with a quote by the cultural critic bell hooks: “The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created.” In the book from which these words are taken she continues: “The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility.”
When City University of New York campuses shut down, I hastily began turning the remaining lectures for my 130-student CONTINUE READING: What We Lose When We Go From the Classroom to Zoom - The New York Times