On the fourth day of spring break, our university’s president announces that no one is to return to campus. Two cases of Covid-19 have been reported in our state. All classes will be moving online. Soon afterward, the members of the humanities faculty receive an email from our dean telling us that “the development of a quality online course takes at least two years.” We have 12 days. I feel like a runner with decent times in the 800 meters whose coach says, You still get to go to the track meet, but we’ve switched you to the pole vault!
The dean notes encouragingly that Isaac Newton did his best work when Cambridge University closed during the plague.
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Each spring, I teach Writing about Oneself, a class on first-person reading and writing, to 12 Yale undergraduates chosen from 100 or so. The number of applicants has nothing to do with my skills as an instructor. The key word is “Oneself,” which is irresistible to 20-year-olds. If my class were called Writing about the Universe, hardly anyone would apply.
Every year I fill out the registrar’s Pedagogical Needs Request Form, leaving 14 of the 15 “Technological Needs” boxes unchecked. (No, I don’t need a SMART board. No, I don’t need a digital projector. No, I don’t need a Blu-ray player.) The only box I check is “Other.” I explain that because the class requires intimacy, my only Pedagogical Need is a round table in the smallest possible room. I add, “The sort of discussions we have don’t work well when the students are spread too far apart.”
I always hope we’ll be assigned to Linsly-Chittenden 212, a tiny room in a faux-Gothic hall built in 1907. In the years when Writing about Oneself—or WaO, as my students and I refer to it—has been assigned a larger room, we have removed the center leaves of the big oval table every week, carried them to the side of the room, and replaced them at the end of class: the precise opposite of social distancing.
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During the remainder of the spring semester, there will be five WaO classes, each 2 hours and 50 minutes; 18 hour-long conferences in which my students and I will edit their work together; 12 half-hour conferences in which we’ll talk about their overall accomplishments; 8 hour-long conferences with my advisees in the Writing Concentration; 5 half-hour conferences with my other advisees; and an as-yet-unknown number of additional meetings with students and faculty. All will be conducted via Zoom.
I have never used Zoom. I am having enough trouble figuring out how to use my new BlackBerry (itself an anachronism), which replaced my old BlackBerry, which did not support either Android or iOS apps, which meant I was the only person I knew who couldn’t call a Lyft, which meant that whenever I needed a ride I had to ask my students to reserve one and hand them a small stack of dollar bills. At the moment, my new BlackBerry sends but refuses to receive texts. It makes little pings at all hours to alert me to various things that I call “things” because I have no idea what they are.
This does not bode well.
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I sign up for an online Zoom class taught by the university’s educational technology staff.
Our Zoom teacher is named Brian. I expect him to speak from a high-tech office, but of course he doesn’t. Most campus buildings are closed. Brian addresses us from his bedroom, which has an impressive record collection, an electric-guitar case, a full wastebasket, a bowl of pet food, and a bed whose duvet is slightly askew. He has a beard and a voice so soothing that he sounds as if he is telling a bedtime story. This is exactly what we need. The other faculty members who are taking the class—I see their diminutive heads, some of them gray-haired, arrayed in a vertical column on the right of my screen—are probably as terrified as I am.
Brian is an excellent teacher. He shows us how to sign in to the university’s Zoom page and calmly guides us through the mysteries of Gallery vs. Speaker View, Spotlight Video, Microphone Mute and Unmute, Chat, Screen Share, Whiteboard, and Breakout Rooms. I’ve heard Zoom images described as “squares,” but I see now that they’re horizontal rectangles, each inhabited by a face. In addition to us real students, Brian has four pretend students, one per rectangle. Two of them, Clare and Timberley, whose names are displayed below them in white, are fellow educational technology staffers. They wave at us. The other two—Barry, a small blue teddy bear, and Yoda, who is crocheted—do not wave.
When Brian gets to Breakout Rooms, he explains that this is a way to split a meeting into smaller groups. He demonstrates by placing Clare and Yoda in one Breakout Room and Timberley and Barry in the other.
I scribble four pages of notes, since I don’t know how to Zoom and type on my laptop at the same time. (Later I find out that I could have set up a Zoom window side-by-side with a note-taking window, like a motorcycle with a sidecar.) Ninety percent of my notes are illegible. The only line I can read in its entirety is “When all done, click End Meeting for All, not just Leave Meeting!”
There’s a recorded version of Brian’s class online. I watch it again. And again. Barry and Yoda look serene. They learned it all on the first go-round.
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With the possible exception of Capitol Hill, there is no place more tolerant of Boomers than academia. Instead of being discreetly ushered toward the door at 65 or pressured to dye our hair, we are permitted to age gracefully into éminence grise-dom. But what will happen if we constantly forget that in order to screen-share you have to press the green button and then the blue button, and keep saying “Can you see me?” when of course they can see you, and screw up when we toggle between Gallery View and Speaker View (which, you’ve got to admit, is pretty confusing, since if you’re on Gallery View and you hover your mouse at the upper right corner of your screen, the button says “Speaker View”—by which it means not “That’s what you’re on” but “Click here and that’s what you’ll get”)? Will our entire cadre of older faculty members morph from larger-than-life sages into teeny little pariahs wearing dunce caps?
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I do a trial Zoom run with two of my advisees. Everything goes swimmingly until I try to screen-share a document I plan to show my WaO class. They can’t see a thing.
I Google “zoom screen share.” I practice again, this time with my husband. Bingo.
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Gen Z-ers are fish. Screens are water. I expect my students to know everything about Zoom just because.
But a few hours before my first class, one of my WaO students emails to ask if he can practice his Oscar Wilde presentation on me. (This week we’re reading De Profundis, the letter Wilde wrote to his lover when he was imprisoned in Reading Gaol.) If I understand correctly, Mark is attempting a combination of Screen Share, Virtual Background, and Green Screen in order to position an image of Wilde, which he has Scotch-taped to a ruler he’s holding in front of his face, in front of an image of the library at Trinity College Dublin, Wilde’s alma mater. (My students are nothing if not ambitious.) The results are mixed: I see bookshelves and something ectoplasmic floating in space, but I do not see Oscar Wilde.
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When I click the Zoom link two minutes before class, my heart is beating fast. It’s mostly anxiety, but I’m also psyched to see my students, an especially smart, funny, mutually supportive group of very good writers.
There they are, all 12 of them, popping one by one onto my screen, just the way they’d arrive in Linsly-Chittenden 212 at staggered intervals, some strolling in early, some running in late and breathless because their previous class was on Science Hill. Simon, Lily, Jack, Britt, Elliot, Grace, Naomi, Elena, Emma, Mark, Charlotte, Michael. There’s a lot of waving. They are so happy to see each other! And I am so happy to see them. Only when their familiar faces are in front of me do I fully realize how much I’ve missed them, and worried about them, since our last class three weeks ago.
They are arranged in three rows of four, with my rectangle in the top row and Lily, the 13th rectangle, hanging off the bottom. Each rectangle is a miniature scene. Some of my students sit at desks; some lounge on sofas or beds; one sits cross-legged on her basement floor. Some of them are well lit; some are silhouetted against windows; some sit in the dark looking down at laptop screens that illuminate their faces as if they were witches bending over cauldrons. Some are more pixelated than others, depending on the quality of their Wi-Fi; Elena is sort of smudged and moves in jerks. Britt’s walls are blue. Grace’s are peach-colored. If I squint, the Zoom grid looks a lot like the cover of a book my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 14, illustrated with a painting from Paul Klee’s Magic Squares series.
That’s what my students look like in Gallery View. In Speaker View, the person who is talking occupies a large window and everyone else shrinks into thumbnails or vanishes entirely.
We spend the first 10 minutes checking in. I exclaim, “Here’s where I’m speaking from!” I intend to show a picture of my home, an aging New England farmhouse, but instead mistakenly screen-share my desktop wallpaper, a picture of my kids backpacking in Washington state.
My students go next. I expect them to speak in the same sequence as their little rectangles, starting at the top left of the screen, but I discover that the rectangles are sequenced differently on each of our screens and there is no Zoom equivalent of “going around the table.” I have to call on everyone by name.
All but two are back home, living with their parents. They are beaming in from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, and California. Naomi tells us that she has been doing most of the cooking; her father is staying away from the kitchen because his boss was diagnosed with Covid-19. Britt hasn’t left the house in two weeks. Jack has been going for runs with his mother. Emma and her family have been playing board games. Lily is getting good at ping-pong.
Mark’s presentation on Oscar Wilde goes (almost) without a hitch. Most of the time, Wilde hovers flawlessly in front of the Trinity library, Ludgate Circus, and Reading Gaol, among other backdrops, though he occasionally disappears and Mark says, “Oops.”
Each week in WaO, we discuss an older work (written at least 40 years ago) and a newer work. Wilde is our older author. This week’s newer work is a New Yorker essay by a former student of mine on his mother’s trial and incarceration for a crime she may or may not have committed. Victor joins us via Zoom. By pre-arrangement, he arrives half an hour after the class starts—our 14th rectangle. My students pepper him with questions. When I ask how his family is, Victor pauses and then says that both of his parents have the coronavirus.
In the “workshop” segment near the end of each WaO class, we spend half an hour or so talking about a student essay. Normally, the author passes out hard copies and reads it aloud. Screen Share allows us to look at Britt’s essay, which I scroll through while her thumbnail image reads it to us. It’s surprisingly similar to a regular workshop.
At the end of class, my husband and my son walk in with guitars and sing “Pack Up Your Sorrows” to my students. Everyone claps and hoots.
I Zoom with Victor a few minutes later. He says that he didn’t want to tell the class that though his mother has a mild case, his father’s condition is serious. He was taken by ambulance a week ago to Elmhurst Hospital in Queens.
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That night I tell my husband that the class went better than I’d expected, but I’m worried for Victor.
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The director of creative writing starts an email thread on which we teachers can share our Zoom experiences.
A playwright, addressing his “Sisters and brothers in Zoom,” writes that his first class was like a so-so first date. His screen froze (bandwidth problems) and he had to reboot half a dozen times.
A novelist says he has one student who’s back home in China, 12 hours ahead of us, and another with severely limited access to Wi-Fi.
A poet recommends using two laptops, in order to look at student work on one screen while Zooming on the other.
An arts critic writes that her class featured a guest appearance by the director of dance studies, who led the students through “Passing and Jostling While Being Confined to a Small Apartment,” a dance choreographed by Yvonne Rainer that involves climbing over beds and sofas.
Everyone is encouraging and helpful. It’s touching to hear Pulitzer Prize winners share cyber tips. But before we can get too mired in Zoom protocols, the director of the university’s journalism initiative reminds us why we writing teachers are here. He tells us that just as doctors are first responders in emergencies, so are journalists and poets and novelists. Students, too, he writes, are “called to figure out what the moment asks of them. I am trying to tell them that their work is more important than ever, that the world needs them to keep working on their craft.”
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When I prepared my first Zoom class, I didn’t mess with the syllabus, because the students had already started the reading, but afterward I send them an email: During the next four weeks, shall I scrap some of the readings and replace them with writing related to the pandemic?
I am astonished that the answer is a near-unanimous no. My students say they’re already drowning in “corona-content” and have little desire for more. Not only do they want the reading list to stay exactly the same, they even want to press on with the class’s grammar sessions. I ask if learning the difference between “that” and “which” might feel like fiddling while Rome burns. Nope. I conclude that everything else in their lives has turned upside down and they want one small part of it to stay familiar.
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I know I have to change some things, though.
Staring at a screen is tiring. My students—and I—need more breaks.
It’s hard for them to know when to speak. In a seminar room, they scan each other for subtle body-language cues and instinctively cede conversational space to a classmate who is gathering the courage to say something. On Zoom, if I ask an open-ended question directed at the class as a whole, there is silence while everyone waits politely for someone to answer. They tell me they don’t want to use the Raise Hand feature, which would raise a digital hand on my screen and alert me to call on them, but they are sometimes reluctant to raise their real hands, which I can see in Gallery View. I decide to ask more specific questions and direct them to specific students.
I realize I need to incorporate a check-in at the beginning of every class, as much to reassure me that they are OK as to give them a chance to vent. “How are you doing?” proves too vague. I come up with pairs of bad and good things: Tell us something in the last week that was hard and something that you learned. Tell us a moment when you weren’t your best self and a moment when you were. I answer too.
I need to interrupt the soporific flow of pixels more frequently. Sharing more images and documents will help. I have somehow managed to survive thus far without learning PowerPoint, but the time has come.
I ask my husband and my son to send us off with a musical coda at the end of every class.
All this extra stuff eats into our time. WaO is a blend of seminar, workshop, and lecture. Something has to give. What’s most important now is letting the students talk. I look at my lecture notes, and I cut and cut and cut.
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The next class is meh. I am boring and my students are bored.
I tell my husband that I am a bad Zoom teacher and because all we’ve got is Zoom, that means I’m a bad teacher.
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My students are so sad. They know that others have it harder, that the pandemic weighs most heavily on the communities with the fewest resources. One student is concerned that job losses, coupled with the state government’s unwillingness to cancel rent payments, will lead to mass evictions and food shortages in New Haven. Another, a volunteer with an organization that makes free deliveries to at-risk clients, has been reading notes on their orders for medications and baby formula saying they are afraid of dying. Later, she tells me in an email that she and her friends spend a lot of time “talking about how lucky we are and how shitty we feel for not having better answers to our own questions and then how shitty we feel for still feeling sad about all of the superficial things we miss about our old lives.”
There is much to miss. Their summer jobs and internships have been canceled. Their plays have been canceled. Their 21st birthday party has been canceled. Their paintings lie half-finished in the art studios. Their textbooks and favorite clothes are in their dorm rooms because they didn’t think they’d need them over spring break. They are having depressing Zoom calls with friends they can’t hug.
It’s worst for the seniors. Senior spring is supposed to be the best time they’ll ever have in college, the time to consolidate friendships and check off their bucket lists and try to hook up with people they’ve always considered out of their league, because it’s now or never. They’ll miss Senior Week: Bar Night, the Last Chance Dance, the Day of Service, the senior picnic. They’ll miss Commencement.
And then they’ll enter a dried-up job market.
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Michael’s father loses his cousin.
Elena loses her grandfather.
Victor’s father dies in Elmhurst Hospital.
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A therapist friend, now a teletherapist, says she receives a lot of unintended information from her patients during their Zoom sessions—socioeconomic status, taste in interior decor. When my students Zoom from their living rooms, I learn about their parents’ taste; when they Zoom from their bedrooms, I learn about their taste when they were in high school. (Mark has lots of sports pennants.) Only the two students who didn’t go home for spring break and are stuck in off-campus apartments, in one case an ocean away from his family, are sitting on secondhand sofas they bought, in front of posters they hung.
Privacy is an issue. Some of them are writing about the very people they now find themselves living with or about aspects of their lives that might cause their parents pain. One student worked on a WaO essay at the dining table, ready to clap her laptop shut if anyone passed behind her. Another asked his parents to walk the dog while he read aloud a piece in one of our workshops.
My own adult kids are home too. Susannah attends medical school from the guestroom. Henry—who returned home from Alaska via five airports and, while passing through the third, received an email informing him that his job in Maine had been canceled—does freelance reporting from the dining room. When Susannah is on a Zoom call, she turns on a white noise machine. When Henry has a Zoom job interview, he instructs me to stay upstairs with the door closed and lends me his Beats headphones. Before another interview (for a job where he too would be a Zoom teacher), he is so insistent on privacy that George and I shut ourselves in our bedroom and take a nap.
Teaching my class helps me understand my kids’ frustration at having dependence forced on them just when they’ve mastered independence. My students say they’ve been impatient with their parents, spacing out in conversations with them, glaring at them, making “disparaging mouth sounds” at them. But they’ve also been worrying about them—going to the gas station because they don’t want their parents to leave the house, wishing their moms weren’t picking up groceries for elderly friends or showing up for work at the bank.
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I Zoom with one of my former students, a junior whose education is funded by federal grants for undergraduates with exceptional financial need. His mother, whose job carries a high risk of coronavirus exposure, has asked him to leave the apartment the two of them usually share because she is afraid of infecting him. He speaks to me from a room he has rented in a house with seven people, one bathroom, and frequent toilet paper shortages.
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One night, George and Henry and I watch Groundhog Day, which we’ve unaccountably never seen before. It’s the perfect quarantine movie. The hero, a pompous TV weatherman, is compelled to live the same day over and over. At first he despairs, but after getting drunk, robbing a bank truck, having unsatisfying one-night stands, and attempting increasingly extravagant forms of suicide, he decides to become productive—to view his monotonous life not as a constraint but as an opportunity for growth. Over thousands of February 2’s, he learns French, ice sculpting, and boogie-woogie piano.
My students have been forgetting what day it is, having trouble focusing, spending too much time on TikTok, eating too many jellybeans, staying up till 6 AM. But as the semester progresses, they also learn how to do handstands, use a borrowed DSLR camera, make pasta with lemon butter and chorizo, and play “Here Comes the Sun” on the ukulele. They sew masks, bake bread, look at old family photos with their parents, have a Zoom Seder with relatives, decorate the house for Easter while their mom is sleeping, proofread their friends’ theses, and conduct Zoom tutorials on how to give self-administered buzz cuts. And they write like demons.
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I notice a weird thing about Zoom: In order to give people the impression that you’re making eye contact, you have to look not at them but at the little camera lens at the top of your computer. Their images are lower down. If you look at them, you won’t look as if you’re looking at them.
Another weird thing: I can see myself while I’m teaching. It’s mesmerizing. How have I gone 66 years without knowing that when I talk, the right side of my mouth is lower than the left?
I read an article by Tom Ford on how to look good on Zoom. He suggests elevating the computer so the camera is slightly higher than your head. I experimentally place a wooden step stool on my desk and my laptop on the step stool. OMG, I look so much better! I haven’t had so few chins in years. But from this vantage point, the teetering stacks of unfiled papers on my floor are visible, not just the ones on my desk. Which is worse, looking old or looking messy? I put the stool away.
Later, while fiddling with Video Settings, I stumble on an option called Touch Up My Appearance. I click it. I can’t tell the difference.
One advantage of Zoom is that since only my upper quarter is visible, I can teach class in my slippers.
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A friend who teaches at another university tells me that a new Yiddish word has been invented: oysgezoomt, “over-exposed to Zoom,” as in “Ich bin azoy oysgezoomt!” (“I’m so done with Zoom!”)
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As always, my students do all the reading every week and have strong opinions about it. They are divided on Elizabeth Wurtzel (some find her thrillingly brave, others off-puttingly self-involved) and Maxine Hong Kingston (some find her vivid and imaginative, others florid). Almost everyone loves Nora Ephron, Brent Staples, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, and, to my surprise, Charles Darwin, who, I remind them, failed at everything his father wanted him to do and still became Charles Darwin.
My students take advantage of Zoom for their author presentations. Elliot switches expertly from PowerPoint slides to a video clip of Ephron giving the 1996 Wellesley commencement address, in which she says that when she was a Wellesley student, she was told to do something about her New Jersey accent even though she had been raised in Beverly Hills. Grace won’t have a commencement herself this spring, but she wants to celebrate a commencement, so she shows a list of McCarthy’s nine honorary degrees superimposed on a video of graduation caps being tossed in the air.
They use Zoom’s Chat function to type comments without having to interrupt the class—apologizing for popping in and out because of Wi-Fi issues, providing the link for a relevant YouTube video, or, when Jack mentions that the book at the top of his post-graduation to-read list is Middlemarch, writing “SO FREAKING GOOOOODD!”
The class gets less meh.
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I learn more about my students. During breaks in my regular class, after they returned from Starbucks or the bathroom, they congregated on the landing outside the classroom while I stayed inside. I had no idea what they talked about. Now, if they want to hang out with each other after they fetch a bowl of Cheerios from the kitchen, they’re stuck with me too. As they wait for the rest of the class to reassemble, I get to hear them discuss their favorite bands and music festivals, their enduring devotion to Dungeons & Dragons, the best way to peel a hard-boiled egg, and whether guys use hair conditioner. (Simon does. Mark doesn’t.)
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I get better at Zoom.
I Google instructions for “Enabling In-Meeting File Transfer,” “Finding and Viewing Recordings,” and “How Do I Change The Video Layout?” (Why does Zoom capitalize the “The”?) And then, because I am a Boomer, I print them all out.
In a normal WaO class, I meet with each of my students for an hour every other week to edit their work together at the computer in my college office. I email the educational technology department to ask if I can do this over Zoom. Will the students be able to see me edit in real time? Will it work even if I’m using WordPerfect, a word-processing application they don’t have? The answers (yes and yes) come back from Timberley, one of the pretend students in Brian’s Zoom class. I feel as if I’m corresponding with an indie film star.
I learn how to use Breakout Rooms. During one class, I divide my students into two groups and give them five minutes to comb Ephron’s “A Few Words About Breasts” for the 10 sources of humor that we discussed earlier in the semester. It’s a scavenger hunt. Go!
When I do make mistakes—even when I try to show a video and Naomi has to remind me to click “Share Computer Sound” before I click “Share Screen”—my students forgive me. After all, performance anxiety runs counter to the spirit of WaO. I’ve told them many times that good first-person writing demands vulnerability. The epigraph at the top of our syllabus is a passage by Montaigne in which he declares that when he writes an essay, he endeavors to be as “whole, and wholly naked” as civilization allows. If my students are willing to share their secrets in their writing and to invite me into their homes over Zoom, an occasional dunce cap won’t kill me.
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At the beginning of one class, we show each other our pets, including fish.
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I start to get obnoxious about Zoom. George and I have a “Zoom breakfast” with a couple we’re close to. The husband, a college counselor, tells us that while he was on a Zoom meeting with a group of parents, his laptop battery ran low, and he treated everyone to a tour of his house (bizarre camera angles, peeved spouse) while he searched for his charger. “Next time,” I tell him, “you could just click Stop Video at bottom left!”
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Most of my students have bad news, but there’s good news too.
Mark is chosen by Report for America to cover small towns in shale and farm country for the Victoria Advocate, the second oldest paper in Texas.
Grace finds out that her job at a talent agency has not been canceled after all. It will just have a later start date.
Elliot hears that he will be permitted to do his summer internship at the Los Angeles Times remotely.
Simon, who wants to be a standup comedian, was chosen before spring break to team up with Oscar, a student I taught last year, to do the “Comedic Reflection” during Commencement weekend. After the university went online, they assumed it would be canceled. But they are told they can record it as a Zoom dialogue—one rectangle in Connecticut, one in South Central LA—that will be posted on the senior class website. It’s not the same as performing in front of a live audience of 10,000 people whose laughter they can hear. But it’s something.
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An advisee asks if I will schedule a Zoom meeting on the pretext of “catching up” with Ko Lyn, a former student. The real reason is that Ko Lyn is going to be tapped for a campus secret society. Normally the tap would take place at the society’s clubhouse, known as a “tomb,” but this year it will be virtual. It’s supposed to be a surprise. Ko Lyn will click the Zoom link at the appointed hour and, instead of me, see the smiling faces of 15 society members welcoming her into the fold.
The only problem is that Ko Lyn is in Singapore. I am instructed to set up a Zoom at 6:30 P.M. Eastern time, which is 6:30 A.M. Singapore time. I feel like a sadist. Why would anyone want to catch up with a former teacher at 6:30 A.M.? To my astonishment, she says yes. Though international students are allowed to attend their virtual classes “asynchronously” by watching recorded videos, Ko Lyn has been staying up all night so she can participate in real time. She says 6:30 is perfect.
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My students will not be receiving grades. All classes this semester will be Pass/Fail.
Initially, the Yale administration decrees that any student may opt out of grades until the last day of exam period, a far more accommodating policy than usual. At first, I believe this is plenty lenient. When eight campus periodicals advocate mandatory Passes for everyone, with no letter grades, I am not sure that’s fair. In my own classes, I am no fan of grades—I think they make good writers take fewer risks—but why should students who have worked hard be deprived of the chance to earn an A if that’s important to them?
Over the course of the semester, I change my mind. Some of our students are completing their classes from private bedrooms in comfortable houses while their parents work from home and have food delivered. Others are home-schooling their siblings in cramped apartments with sick relatives while their parents work in essential jobs, and are attending Zoom classes from the bathroom or with the TV blaring. All these students will be competing for the same jobs once they graduate.
The collegiate playing field is never level, but at least on campus students live in the same dorms, eat the same food, and study in the same libraries. If they can choose to receive grades, I suspect the more privileged ones will be more likely to do so. They’ll probably land on their feet anyway, whether they get an A or a Pass. When the faculty is polled, I vote for Universal Pass/Fail.
Seventy percent of the student body does too, and 55 percent of the faculty. One of the 45 percent tells the Yale Daily News that now that students know they’ll almost certainly pass, they will “disengage” from their classes.
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My students do not disengage. Every one of them attends every class and turns in every assignment, almost always on time. (Michael submits one of his pieces slightly late because it is due one day after his physics thesis, “Scintillation and Ionization Yields of Alpha Particle Interactions in Liquid Xenon.”)
For their final assignments, on which they work for more than a month, they each write a 3,000-word piece about some aspect of their identities. Back in January we all took a vow of confidentiality: We would neither share the essays written in the class nor discuss their topics. I’ll say merely that some of the Identity essays deal with the pandemic, and some do not.
Each student has been assigned an “Identity partner”—a classmate who serves as their cheerleader, their sounding board, and, after a first draft is completed, their editor. Even though grades are no longer at stake, they stay in constant contact with their Identity partners, responding at all hours to a variety of questions: Is the structure of my piece too complicated? Is the title cheesy? Are the transitions jumpy? Is the tone self-aggrandizing? Should the beginning be scrapped? Should the ending be scrapped? Are the funny parts funny? The respondents are always encouraging, though sometimes concerned about whether their partners are getting enough sleep.
I begin to understand that the most important things in the class are happening outside the class. They’re things that Zoom can neither facilitate nor impede. If I teach virtually again next fall, I’m sure we’ll manage, but things will be harder. These 12 students knew each other before they left campus. Their two months of intimacy created a community strong enough to survive their geographic dispersal. They continue to maintain a complex web of communication by email and text and on our class website, where they read each other’s essays and leave long, detailed comments. The words and phrases they use include “awesome,” “spectacular,” “honest,” “unsettling,” “precise,” “elegant,” “beautiful,” “wise,” “deft,” “taut,” “vibrant,” “swoon,” “BAM!,” “this piece sounds like you x5,” “you killed it,” “you just totally nailed it,” “Hahaha oh my god,” “holy moly,” “HOLY CRAP THIS IS AMAZING,” “love love love,” and “Wowowoowow!!”
My students always enjoy each other’s work, but I can’t remember another class whose mutual praise has been so effusive. The thousands of miles that divide them seem to have amplified the unironic warmth they manifested around our seminar table. They have to reach out. They repeatedly describe how connected they feel to each other’s writing: It left them shaking; it gave them goosebumps; they felt they were in a trance; they felt the author was reading their mind; they laughed so hard their dad called down from upstairs and asked if they were OK because he thought they were sobbing; they want to see the author, but “Goddamn quarantine.”
The Identity pieces are awesome.
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I am grateful I have a job. I am grateful I can do it from my home. I am grateful that Zoom enables me to do it.
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On the day of our last class, 23,100 cases of Covid-19 have been reported in our state.
Simon has acquired a mohawk.
Jack has shaved his scruff.
Charlotte is looking forward to spring.
Britt slept through the last meeting of one of her favorite classes and is especially upset because the reason she slept through it was that she stayed up all night doing the reading.
Britt’s a junior, so she’ll have more classes next year. For the five seniors, this class—Thursday afternoon, 2:30 to 5:20—is their last college class, ever.
During those two hours and 50 minutes, I think occasionally about the class that would have taken place today in Linsly-Chittenden 212. There’s a lot that I miss. Sounds, for one. Most of my students politely mute their audio when they’re not talking in order to reduce background noise (the crunch of a potato chip is much louder when you’re a foot from your microphone than when you’re on the other side of a seminar table), which means that when Emma says how sad she is to have to say goodbye to graduating friends over Zoom and Mark says his grandmother has become disoriented during quarantine, you can’t hear the soft exhalations of sympathy. I also miss the smell of the chalk when I write the quotation of the week on the blackboard. (I screen-share it today, as I have for the past four weeks.) And I miss the proximity that enables my students to swipe a pretzel from the person sitting next to them, or lean over to see the course packet if they forgot to bring theirs, or if someone looks downcast, touch their shoulder.
Still, the crackle of last-day-ness feels much the same. The laughter is giddy and there’s electricity in the air, even if it’s not spreading around the table but jumping from rectangle to rectangle.
•
On Easter, my husband attended a Zoom service organized by our local church. The “organist” played an autoharp from his home. The minister gave the sermon from her home, frequently interrupted by the phone ringing. The congregation sang all five verses of “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” with their mics muted, to avoid video-conference time lag. At the end, when prayers were offered for those who were ill and sources of gratitude were shared, one Zoom congregant said he was grateful for kielbasa.
My last class feels like that Easter service. It’s awkward, clunky, and mildly comical, but sitting at a table—real or virtual—with 12 young people who believe in the importance of writing, especially in hard times, still feels sacred.
At 5:20, I am reluctant to click the blue button that says “End Meeting for All.”
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