From entertaining phantoms to building virtual bonds: why I changed my mind on teaching online

-OPINION-

Minutes to the Lockdown

Time: End of February 2020. I had just come back from an expected five-day trip to Spain and France. My mind was still full with a thousand questions that involve comparing them and them to us. By then the SARS Cov-2 was something that only the Chinese had to worry about.

After all, they are used to dealing with a bunch of health crises and natural catastrophes. Two weeks after I had been back home, the country announced an unprecedented three-month lockdown. Had there been people who took the same flight I was on from Valencia to Bordeaux but got stuck in the literal confinements of the old continent? Very likely. Was I a lucky man to be already preparing for the lockdown among my loved ones? Definitely yes. There have never been any uncertain times as mid-March 2020.

The government has made it clear and blunt: Everyone would be home for a bloody three months straight. One person only could leave the household for absolutely necessary needs. But wait for a second, everything I was worried about was the survival of
my family. What had become of my students?

A Teacher Locked up

Piles of worksheets and handouts were lying on my makeshift desk. These never made it to my students. Now that the lockdown is enforced by the authorities, some of my part-time colleagues turned into a sorry band of jobless heads in a matter of hours. If you didn’t master another skill besides teaching, you were doomed to lose a big chunk of who you are. Everyone’s identity was at stake. Some friends went back to that pending E-com or coding course; others got tangled within the shellshock of abruptly waking up as a dependent family member.

I was among the few lucky ones whom the school couldn’t do without – as per our contracts. There were unfinished courses to be made up for, and communication with adult students and kids’ parents had to be maintained. All of a sudden, a mighty deluge of sedentary work just poured in.

Everything is now being done remotely, even training! Looks more like that eerie darkness that comes right before being swallowed by a lengthy, twisted tunnel.

Perception of Online Learning

Somebody from the administration mentioned that teaching will be delivered online, through Zoom. Ironically enough, I had just had a conversation with a colleague who forwarded me an online course job offer. I mockingly turned it down claiming that “I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing this. Doesn’t sound different to teaching ghosts, does it?!”.

Here I am. I do have to teach phantoms now. How would I know they are actually before their screen? Would they care to answer my instruction and concept check questions? What if they don’t have cameras on their laptop? Mine doesn’t have one either; how would I, myself, teach remotely then? I don’t want to go into this world. I, who would spend valuable hours investing in building up a robust, humane rapport with my students in face-to-face (f2f) classes, (I) now have to do it virtually. I have never been ready for this, neither was anyone happy with the outbreak and its confusing ramifications.

Into the New Teachers’ Room

I thought that apologizing to the administration through referring to my modest laptop would spare me the work with phantoms. It didn’t. I ended up being one of them. I don’t have a camera on my machine. Over the phone, somebody said, in a patronizing pitch, “You need to go and get one now!” I calmly said NO. The risk of going out into the unknown, to me, looked far greater than being visible to my colleagues in virtual training meet-ups.

A few days later, my phone rang again, and I was given a laptop with a working camera. How? Saying no sometimes pays off, mainly if one gauges their scale real tight. So, training sessions got being scheduled in a rush ..right and left. Sometimes two at the same time. Training timetables looked heavier than ever. I had to be kept busy. As soon as I saw through this, I developed a few tricks to avoid falling for it along the way. Some practice-oriented sessions were super solid. Other slots were a sheer waste of my quarantine time. At such moments, I was somewhere tinkering the features of a platform or reading an article about teaching online. In addition to the in-house training I received, three secrets proved awesome boosters for my remote-teaching skills. Let me whisper out what I did.

First, three of my colleagues and I had conspired on a cunning plot. We would hold private Zoom meetings and take turns, for a few minutes, at being the 2.0 teacher we were needed to become. I did the same thing with my wife as well. We would leave one device in a room, I’d use the other in the kitchen, and she would call me with a third device from the living room. The three
attending the same meeting. I am afraid I can’t delve into what we said over those calls, though!

The second trick was a Future Learn MOOC (https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/online-tutoring) that I attended on my own time. It had four weeks and I have gotten fabulous tips out of each. Do you want to teach one of the four skills, grammar, or vocabulary? They got you covered.

The last secret was an eye-opening set of video tutorials made by Cambridge ELT and presented by Carol Rainbow (https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2020/03/16/using-video-conference-platform-teaching-online/). First, I have known almost nobody at Carol’s age who happens to handle a digital platform the way she does. This was mind-blowing! Also, the knowledge Carol was sharing, neatly and sensibly, came at the very right time. Indeed, I owe her, the Future-Learn
guys, my three colleagues, and mostly, my partner, a great deal.

First Class

Come the beginning of April 2020, I was still entertaining mixed feelings about the training period. A few administration-offered sessions were very good, but the cream of what I have learned was through the schedule I had set for myself. I knew my very immediate needs for such a critical period. We can’t disagree as well that teachers mark varying degrees of potential when it comes to digital literacy. Soon enough, my first sessions were looming around. Earlier, I pictured them as a heavily armed platoon marching steadily towards my too frail a village. I now know how to play around with Zoom and Teams, how to share files, play audio, and .. and .. and, but it was time to manipulate the attention of ghostly individuals coldly lurking from behind dark mirrors from a safe, but awkward distance.

Done. The first session was over. My wife said I was talking too loud. Some students were reluctant to step up. Some of their family members’ noises would sometimes surprise everyone attending the session. I had planned for the session thoroughly and tried to anticipate several emerging problems. But a few more rules had to be added to the list, sort of a checklist to be shared
with learners before they hit the join button. Despite a few technical hiccups that I got to fix on the spot, I was generally happy with the lesson. I never thought I would be giving classes behind a little window of glass. I did it, and it was thought-provoking. A memorable leap in my too young a career with this school. But, a burning question kept buzzing around my head: “What made me
change my mind about teaching online?” It took me months to sneak into shatters of the answer.

New Normal

By summer 2020, I had given many make-up classes and a reasonable number of courses. Colleagues in the public sector say it was a catastrophe. Many low-income families couldn’t afford to ensure more connected devices for all their kids at home. The majority of teachers weren’t ready to teach online either. Others simply didn’t believe it was a thing in the first place. I am aware this is not the right place to ponder on the implications of parents’ social class on the quality of their children’s education, but I was proud of what I have learned that far. I got to enumerate, hands-on, the pros and cons of teaching online or face-to-face (transport/dress/digital requirements/social bond, etc.).

Even now, if I am given a choice, I still find it difficult to decide whether to opt for f2f or online courses, each has its perks. It was thanks to the pandemic, or online teaching so to say, that I recognized that I had a hidden intrinsic interest in integrating digital tools into the teaching and learning business. I think this is going to be a path on which I have a long way to go if I am to expand my knowledge and hone my practice. In hindsight, that supposedly Wuhan pangolin, bat -or whatever non/edible creature it was – didn’t completely have bad intentions for everyone.

Conclusion: Turning Heads

Here at home, there is a proverb that says, “A head which doesn’t spin is a hill.” It is a wise portrait that refers to somebody who trades their earlier position for another one which makes more sense. Other people might also use it to justify the unjustifiable, as in when they change their mind for the sake of doing it.

My new, steadfast belief is that online learning will be sped up as we’ve never seen before. Witnessing Facebook becoming Meta, video games involving more VR goggles and physical movement, and military training adapting more simulators than real-life drills, I think learning content, any content, will also embrace this trend of a paperless, parallel world. Already many international students can join some of my online courses synchronously. This has its downfalls, so not to sound too utopian, but online teaching and learning are going to be perfected as humanity does what it does best: probing further into the realm of the unknown. I just hope the future ghosts won’t be those teachers working face to face!