IT'S OVER!: Reflections on a Pandemic Semester

from the New York Times

I approached my course evals with more trepidation than any other semester than my first at UT.

Had what I'd done really worked? I was pretty sure not as I read my final papers in both my AWR 101 and 201 classes. Surely the whole point of AWR 101 to teach students how to analyze texts-- and I had never read a batch of 101 papers with so little quoting! How can you analyze if you don't have the details in your papers?! How could I have not gotten this through to them across the course of the entire semester!?!

On the other hand, when on the last day of in-person class in one of my half-sections I gave my pitch for evals and made a comment about how I'd do a lot differently, one student (one whom I thought didn't like the class at all!) told me she thought it was the best organized class she had. Someone else chimed in that it was the only class where he always knew what was going on! I think, to be honest, I'm often very inflexible in my courses: once I start, I don't change for anything except a hurricane. But I think this semester that was a boon, in that this hybrid thing is so confusing that students really benefited just from knowing exactly what was going to happen all the time.

Looking at my plan, I think there were two things I ended up not liking. One was making my "alternative work" and "weekly work" due on Saturdays. This was tough for students who do things at the last minute, and also made grading tougher for me: I had only Sunday to grade it, as opposed to Saturday and/or Sunday. This spring I will just tether my due dates to class dates, even for students who don't actually come to class that day.

The other thing I did was strip back a bit too much. I think it was a good impulse to not overwhelm them, but once we got to near the end of the semester in my Writing and Research class, I began to feel as though I barely had any time to actually talk about writing the actual research paper! Normally we go over several examples that I dissect in detail, but I ended up really only talking through one in not much detail. In removing scaffolding to make my class take up less time, I ended up removing what my students actually needed to climb to the top!

I have to say, one of the toughest things about this form of teaching is building rapport. I think I am often able to win students over to the difficulty of good academic writing with my classroom demeanor... this semester. most students got to experience that once a week in person (if at all), and let me tell you, I don't know how to be funny on Zoom. With the limited interaction of this semester, I'm not sure I ever "won" these classes the way I know I normally can.

And even aside from student learning, I found that sucked a lot of the fun out of teaching. I don't like running classes over Zoom; I don't like grading the million little piddling assignments that I come up with to substitute for in-class work. By early November I was so ready for it all to be over.

On the other hand, once or twice, only two students in my Friday 8:30am cohort showed up... when they were prepared, that was actually kind of nice for them and me! More like a conversation than a class.

So some of that can be fixed-- but much of it cannot! Only an end to this pandemic can bring teaching back to the way it was. Until then, we all soldier on I guess.

(As for my evals? They were basically fine. I didn't actually look up the numbers, but I think they were only down by a couple tenths from my normal scores. Which just shows to go, I guess, that students aren't rating you on how much they learned! But I suppose the Dean will be happy.)