Reflections on an Anniversary
By Mr. Zinn, High School Humanities Teacher
In the years before the pandemic struck I eagerly read books by Sherry Turkle (Life On the Screen) and Jason Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) about the baneful effects of social media and digital interaction, especially on young people who, as we all said, were growing up tethered to their cell phones. Yet over the past year it is precisely those online technologies that have enabled us to keep our school intact and our students somehow moving forward in their education. So I am grateful to this available technology and the emergent resources that have allowed us to convene our classes each day online. It would not have been possible without deep work by the school administration and faculty to coordinate and develop best practices for online learning. It required many of us to bolster our tech resources--I quickly learned that my 10.5" iPad Pro would not do for hosting Zoom conferences! So we have made many adjustments not only in the way we teach but also what we teach. History teaches over and over that progress is often the issue of crisis, and this past year seems like a good example. In the high school, we encouraged ourselves as a staff not only to adapt but to innovate, leading to a revamped, interdisciplinary curriculum that will likely continue even when we are "back" to normal.
Teaching online has in some ways been refreshing. Reading and discussing books together can be enhanced by the way that the screen brings us all visually and even audibly closer. Students who may be reluctant to speak up in class sometimes find it easier to raise their voice online. But that intimacy can be eroded by botched connections and uncooperative software. In addition, it's sometimes hard for me as a teacher to reach out to that student in the back of the digital room who is not participating, not least because we also try to respect and make allowances for those students who do not relish the idea of being continually visible and "seen" onscreen. So it's a mixed blessing. It has helped me as a teacher to privilege connection over distinction, to do my best to keep everyone "in the room" experiencing whatever we are doing together, and to worry less about evaluating students in relation to each other. We are in a lifeboat, not an escalator!
Two blessings of this experience stand out for me. One is collaborative teaching. Given our demands and resources, we teachers all work very hard alongside each other but we seldom have a chance to work together. The new curriculum has changed that; we plan classes and courses together and often teach together as well--a new and enriching experience for us and, I hope, for our students too. The other is the opportunity to be working with a generation of students that impresses me to no end for the virtues that they have displayed and continually practice throughout this ordeal. Just as my own generational experience was shaped by the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, these young people's experience will have been shaped by the pandemic (as well as climate change, civil strife, etc.). The kindness they show to each other, the desire they display for purposeful learning, their unbounded trust in their teachers, and their incredible patience and forbearance even as the typical experiences of adolescence remain unavailable to them--the efforts they make every day to overcome loneliness and the specter of pointlessness--this has left me in something like awe and certainly with gratitude to be part of their lives. That's a blessing that any teacher would hope for.