Pushed to the brink by tech

It was a student, finally, who talked me down off the ledge.

It's been a rough week for everyone suddenly struggling to master the technology needed for moving all course material online. I don't envy my colleagues teaching hands-on courses like art or science labs, but those of us who traffic only in words and ideas are finding the situation difficult enough. Yesterday I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to do necessary stuff in Zoom, and by the end of the day all I wanted to do was to quit teaching entirely and take up something less stressful, like pounding my head against a brick wall all day long.

A tech specialist tried to encourage me. "You're pretty good with technology," she said; "you'll figure it out. Just be glad you're not--" and then she named a colleague known for antipathy to all sorts of technology. 

Well I saw Dr. Antipathy yesterday, and he's not struggling at all. He looked calm and well rested, in stark contrast to my frazzled and freaked-out appearance. "I'll just give my students some extra assignments," he said; "I'm not going to bother with any of that online stuff" (although he may have used a more vivid word than "stuff").

But I need that online stuff! I need to lead class discussions, present information visually and verbally, and encourage student engagement, and to do that I need to move beyond Moodle and master all the elements of Zoom, all while wondering why all these educational access programs sound like they were named by four-year-olds. And despite some experience with online learning, I'm not finding any of this easy.

I keep being reminded of my mother, who was a registered nurse for many decades, adapting to vast changes in medical care without much fuss or complaint. She never made the switch to wearing scrubs but instead held on to her white nursing uniform and little starched hat, but she had to adjust to all the technological changes involved in caring for oncology patients. She loved her job so I was surprised when she retired, but she'd reached a point where she would need to learn a whole new set of procedures for administering chemotherapy and she decided it was just a bridge too far. 

Yesterday I wondered whether Zoom is my bridge too far, the point where all my teaching skills break down and leave me helpless and blubbering in front of my class. I felt my confidence diminishing with each click of the mouse, and at my lowest point I started composing a resignation letter in my head.

But it's amazing how much more hopeful things look after a good night's sleep. Today I tackled the worst of the technology and got all my classes prepared for Monday, but I still lacked confidence that the setup would work. Then along came an email from student who is scheduled to give a presentation in the Colson Whitehead class on Monday, and before you know it I'd set up a test meeting space in Zoom to let her run through her presentation, and then we tried out some of the other functions so she could tell me how things looked from her end. We had a few rough spots but I'm pleased to report that everything worked without too much fuss.
 
I think I'm ready to roll out online classes on Monday, but here's the scary part: it took me the better part of the week just to prepare for one day's teaching. I certainly hope I've moved past the worst part of the learning curve because there aren't enough hours in the day to put this amount of effort into every class for the rest of the semester, provided that we have a rest of the semester.

And one last thing: if working with this technology made me feel so thoroughly hopeless and confused, how will my students feel? At least I can tell them truthfully that I feel their pain.