Zooming to Sonder

How online teaching helped me see my students

Content warning: This piece is about the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only that, it’s about a positive growth experience I had during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may strike you as insensitive or privileged. It’s the second post in a series on the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to my departure from academia. You can read part one here.

One of my oldest memories is the moment I discovered that I am not the center of the universe. I was maybe 5 or 6 and had been home sick from school for a few days. When I returned to Jefferson Elementary, a place I loved with all my heart, I was floored to discover that class had gone on without me, that lessons and fights and imaginative play happened when I was not there to witness them. Babies learn about the permanence of objects during their first year of life; now I was learning about the permanence of happenings.

Does this seem like an abnormally high level of self-involvement for a kid that age? Or was it just a sign of being the first child, used to being the center of her parents’ universe? I don’t know if I was a budding narcissist, or just a kid with big main character energy, but I do know that the shock of that moment, a kind of kindergarten sonder¹, has stayed with me all these years. And it feels very connected to something that happened when I was teaching my first Zoom class during the spring of 2020, during the switch to online teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But let’s back up for a second and talk about me and my attitude about teaching.

A feed-forward cycle of judgmental teaching.

I am going to be honest here and say that I have never enjoyed teaching. Some traumatic experiences as a TA (fodder for another set of posts, I’m sure) made me self-conscious and fearful of judgment by my students. I did love the material, of course, and I truly did spend hours and hours trying to be a good teacher, but I was never confident in the classroom. I was always worried that my content was wrong or unclear, that I was going too fast or too slow, that the students weren’t interested, that they could see through my all my efforts to seem friendly and competent.

Early on the tenure track, I’d stumbled upon the forums section of the online Chronicle of Higher Education. It was a wonderful place for faculty to anonymously trade advice and complaints. One of the threads, vividly titled “Bang Your Head on Your Desk: A Thread of Teaching Despair”, was an endless river of venting from faculty about the self-centered students, the “special snowflakes”, in their classrooms. For a while, reading it was a hugely entertaining and reassuring activity for me, and I enjoyed feeling vicariously indignant. But I eventually realized that engaging in this kind of snark was further souring my already bad attitude, and I stopped reading it. The CHE-sponsored forums disappeared some time around 2019, though in writing this piece I discovered that there is a replacement website² and a related reddit sub³.

I remained painfully self-conscious about teaching far past tenure, often resorting to the kinds of judgments that I’d read in the CHE forums. This did not escape the students, nor did it endear me to them. They wrote savage teaching evaluations, making me hurt and defensive. So I stopped reading my teaching evaluations—which in turn made me less responsive to students . . . you get the picture. It all created and then maintained a kind of feed-forward cycle that made me (and likely my students) continously dread the classroom.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic happened.

Like almost every other institution of higher education, my small private R1 in the Midwest flipped to remote learning during the spring of 2020. We could see the first round of pandemic shut-downs happening on the coasts during our spring break, and at the end of the week the administration gave the students a second week of break.

For faculty, this was a chance to prepare for the rest of the semester, teaching what would now be online classes. The Teaching Center and the administration must have worked 24/7, because they provided us with a solid set of guidelines, advice, and software. We were reminded, time and again, to be gentle, that we didn’t know what any particular student might be experiencing, that this was unprecedented.

When my first day of teaching after our extended spring break arrived, I settled into my home desk in the sunroom of our condo—an IKEA hack consisting of a wooden countertop placed on two small filing cabinets. I made sure the view behind me caught some plants and was angled away from the distracting table of disorganized art supplies. I got my 4^th grader online with his teachers and closed the door. I put on my headset and clicked the link to a Zoom meeting I’d set up the day before.

One by one, the students joined our online classroom, filling up the Brady Bunch squares on my screen. I’d had a few months to learn their names, and to see who was doing well in the class and who was not. But I didn’t really know any of my students personally. They came to my classroom, bringing their backpacks and laptops and Stanley cups, but little else.

I asked everyone to let me know how they were doing. As each student spoke, their little box expanded to fill most of my laptop screen. And I could see not just their face, but where they were speaking from, both physically and metaphorically. One student was outside, an early spring wind whipping her hair and plastering it against the red barn wall behind her. One was slumped next to their unmade bed, reluctantly turning his camera on to speak, then quickly off again. One was in a gaming chair, one always showed up with a bath towel around his neck. One by one, I saw their bedrooms and living rooms and decks. I saw the art on their walls, met their pets, heard their families or roommates in the background.

And it was magical. My heart truly opened up. I finally saw that these students, who’d made it into a highly selective university, who’d been ejected from their normal college lives so abruptly, who were doing their best in a really messed up time in history, were special little snowflakes.

A student-centered sonder.

Why did it take Zoom and the pandemic for me to see the full humanity of my students? Maybe it was the repeated admonishments from the administration to have grace and kindness. Maybe it was the shift from students coming into my classroom to me being invited into their lives. Maybe I needed a concrete way to visualize the diverse contexts from which each student was participating in my class. Maybe I was finally growing up. However it happened, this experience of sonder stuck with me, and it changed the way I taught.

Not entirely, though—I still never read my teaching evaluations.

1. Sonder. n. The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. (via the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

2. https://thefora.org/index.php

3. https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/