I am so much happier teaching in person.
We are all masked and the students are pretty good about it. It's a little weird to encounter a student outdoors without a mask, because I'm not very good at predicting what the lower half of someone's face will look like. Learning names is going really slowly, but I'll keep at it.
I have a little microphone. The speaker hooks into a pocket or a waistband, or hangs around my neck if I have neither pocket nor waistband, and the microphone curls around my head like a 1950s phone operator's headset. It is making my life a lot easier. In years past my most consistent request from students in the classroom has always been to speak up and slow down-- I have a small voice and I speed up when I get excited. The microphone doesn't give me a ton of amplification, but it seems to be enough to counteract the effects of the mask. My students always have an open invitation to throw up a hand and ask me to back up, rephrase, slow down -- but nobody is taking me up on the offer this semester.
I saw a professor complaining on social media about the difficulties of masked teaching, saying it had been terribly hard on her lungs and her voice. Little microphones FTW, man. My voice is holding up better than usual. When the microphone does the work, my lungs don't have to.
It seems like a lot of what we do in the classroom should transfer into online teaching, but that has not been my experience. When I lecture enthusiastically, I can feel the students' reciprocal enthusiasm. I mean, sure, some of them are always going to be yawning in the corner, but I love that sense of taking a class to a new and interesting place where they've never been before. Over the months that I was teaching remotely, it was so disheartening to pour my most enthusiastic efforts into the computer. In the classroom I toss a metaphorical ball to the students and they catch it and throw it back. Online I toss a ball to the students and it thuds to the ground.
Teaching in person makes me tired. When I go to class in person I am ON ON ON, and then afterwards I have a bit of a slump-slump-slump. I've always felt like I should be able to walk right out of class and into the next work task, and it has always bugged me that I need a little time to unwind instead. But this semester I am viewing it differently: on good days, something magical happens in the classroom. And magic is hard work.
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