The other day a former student confessed that she used to be scared of me until one day in class when she suddenly realized that I was being sarcastic and not serious. It takes awhile sometimes to read people's faces, but how much more difficult it is now that we all have to keep our faces covered?
This, I think, may be one of the reasons it's so difficult to get students to engage in class discussions this semester, whether they're face-to-face or on Zoom. I've talked about this with many colleagues and heard many explanations: students are burned out because they've had no breaks, or all the online learning they've been doing has transformed them into passive learners, or they're just succumbing to our vast national pandemic-induced malaise.
These reasons sound convincing but they fail to consider the impact of all the barriers we've erected between ourselves and our students. How much do masks hamper our ability to read faces? I know they disrupt my ability to learn names, but they do more than that: how can a student read the difference between "scary" and "sarcastic" if half of my face is covered?
And then they're so far away--social distancing means I don't spend so much time wandering among the rows or visiting groups or just hanging out in student-rich environments. I'm not seeing students in the stands at sporting events or in the audience at plays or among the crowd at art shows because we're just not doing any of those things, and when I do see them outside of class, I'm not always certain I know who they are.
In so many ways this semester feels like a failure but we've still got five more weeks to go. I don't know how I feel about that--and neither does anyone else, thanks to my mask.
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