Can't teach to an empty room

A colleague once told me I could teach that poem to an empty room and I know what she meant--I have those poems too, or those stories or other works that resonate so deeply that I could stand in front of a room and talk about them passionately even with no one listening--but that was before Covid, before rooms full of masked, silent students, before Zoom screens covered with names showing no indication of life behind them, and I am now willing to say that I could stand in front of an empty room and talk passionately about that poem--but I don't believe I would call it "teaching."

Teaching is transactional, and one thing pandemic teaching mutes is the kind of teacher/student transaction that leads to deep learning. Sure, I can still stand in front of a room and try to engage students in discussion of interesting literature, but masks block my ability to read responses in their faces and Zoom removes students from the scene entirely, so I'm doing a lot of talking but I don't know how much teaching is really being accomplished.

And now I'm giving my last final exam of the semester, so soon students will scatter and I'll be surrounded by nothing but empty rooms. You won't see me standing in empty classrooms talking about literature this summer, which is one reason the end of the semester is a bittersweet moment. Sure, I'll be glad to leave behind the stress of class preps and grading and committee work and dealing with the plagiarizing student who insists he did nothing wrong, but it'll be a long time before I will once again enjoy the extreme privilege of being paid to stand in front of a room full of students and lead them toward understanding of great literature, and I will miss it.

All year I've missed teaching the way we used to teach, and I know this pandemic pedagogy we've been forced to employ will make some permanent changes in how we teach. If nothing else, I've learned that I can't teach anything to an empty room. I just hope that next fall these classrooms will fill up with students who are ready to learn--and that I can recover enough from this year's difficulties to be confident that I have something to teach them.