Post-Covid fantasies both expand and contract

When this is all over, I told my colleague, I intend to burn Zoom, which would be difficult to accomplish even if Zoom were a physical object instead of a vast cloud-based conspiracy to numb my students into total mindlessness. Burn it, I say! Right down to the ground!

Last March in the first throes of lockdown and all-online teaching, I distracted myself by planning elaborate trips I would take After Covid: flights to California or road trips to Alaska or walks on a New Zealand beach. These days my escape fantasies are far simpler: I just want to take my grandkids to the zoo. I just want to linger at the library or walk the indoor track at the rec center or visit an art museum. 

I want to teach a class with all my students in the same room at the same time, and I want to ask them to form small groups to discuss the reading, and I want to take them all on a field trip and sit around a table at a crowded restaurant talking about literature. Is that really so much to ask? 

And yes, I'd like to see their faces instead of their masks and hear their voices unmuffled by masks and hold face-to-face conferences in my office instead of on Zoom. As much as we rely on Zoom and need Zoom and appreciate what Zoom makes possible, I cannot love the way Zoom inserts itself between me and my students, sometimes dropping a student entirely or mangling the audio so every third word gets lost and always making it way too easy for students to hide behind screens when they should be engaging with ideas.

I know I can't blame Zoom for everything awful about pandemic pedagogy, but with no clear outlet for my anger and frustration, I find relief in the fantasy of taking crowbar in hand and smashing Zoom into a million tiny pieces, or throwing Zoom out of a helicopter to the soundtrack of The Flight of the Valkyries, or tossing Zoom off the edge of a Big Sur cliff and watching it plunge helplessly into the rocky Pacific below. 

And then walking calmly toward a library, hand-in-hand with my grandchildren, with not a mask in sight.