The Loneliness of the Post-Pandemic Classroom
Noah Galuten’s essay, “Food, It Turns Out, Has Little to Do with Why I Love to Travel” (2020), documents his experiences eating his way through the Southwest during the 2020 COVID lockdown. (you can read here: I Thought Eating Food Was the Best Part of Traveling. I Was Wrong. — Eater) Rather than keeping him motivated on the road, the author makes the depressing realization that food isn’t nearly as enjoyable without the human connection of friends, servers, and chance encounters. Even the inability to sit down in a restaurant and hold a menu, or take in the local décor, ruins what have otherwise been a first-rate meal. As he writes,
“There is an emotional atmosphere, a vibe, that’s specific to each and every restaurant, and I had perhaps never been so truly aware that such a thing existed until I noticed it had been zapped entirely from this [trip]. In its place was a blanket of nervous, sad precaution.”
Thanks to COVID, people avoided him or limited contact to the bare essentials; indeed, most restaurants were take-out only. Thus every meal he ordered had to be eaten on the road, in his car, in the stale environment of A/C and body odor. While we might understand his desire for companionship on a long drive, surely at the end of the day, a taco is a taco no matter where you eat it? Is food truly less nourishing, less vital, if eaten alone? Galuten reminds us that yes, food is always more than the ingredients it’s made with:
“…context really does affect flavor. A place, its atmosphere, the people within it, their mood (and ours) genuinely change the way things taste…A rack of smoked pork ribs will never taste as good on a ceramic plate atop a tablecloth as it does from within a Styrofoam box on the hood of your car, downwind from a roadside smoker. I hope that I never find out what Waffle House tastes like while sober, eaten in broad daylight.”
There’s a reason, after all, that Waffle House and Denny’s are hopping at two in the morning. Food, like time, is subjective, and it largely depends on one’s emotional and tactile surroundings. When we lose a favorite restaurant, the same food, even cooked just as well, never quite measures up. Our favorite foods are emotional in the same way our memories are: we can go to the same places we loved as kids, but without the right people (our friends, parents) and the right surroundings (the decade, your innocence, etc.) it will simply never ‘taste’ the same. However, that’s not to say that all old pleasures are irrecoverably lost. Rather, it’s just an acknowledgement that we never experience anything in isolation: for human beings (minus sociopaths, perhaps), most things are created through social interaction, and our enjoyment is heightened by experiencing a food, an activity, even an event through other people’s eyes. For example, try watching a favorite movie with a group of friends; sure beats watching it for the umpteenth time alone!
What does this have to do with education? Similar to Galuten’s experience with food, education post-COVID has also become something that was experienced through a “blanket of nervous, sad precaution.” For most of 2020, classrooms were shifted entirely on-line, removing the human element entirely, or reducing it to a mosaic of tiny faces on Zoom. And even then, most students chose to block out their faces for fear of exposing their rooms or living situation, leading to a sea of black squares, each of them muted, isolated, alone. If this had continued, the chance of meeting your new best friend by randomly choosing an empty seat in your Freshman Comp class would never occur. A spontaneous joke that ripples through the room and creates instant rapport would have been lost. Even worse, that sense of epiphany that comes from an in-the-moment inspiration would be a thing of the past.
Many people have advocated passionately for the move toward on-line learning, which they claim is more equitable, more flexible, and infinitely more safe in our current pandemic (and behold, we now see Monkeypox on the horizon!). It’s hard to argue on first-blush with these claims; on-line learning can take advantage of everything the internet has to offer, as well as making countless public domain texts, images, videos, etc., available at the push of a button. It also eliminates the need for students to be in one place at the same time, freeing them up to work, take care of children, and in general, juggle ‘real lives’ while also being students. And every parent knows the horror of sending their kids to pre-school or Kindergarten for the first time, and having them return, weeks later, laden with round-the-clock sickness from their sickrooms — er, classrooms. So why not move on-line, where time and space are no longer a consideration, quarantine is guaranteed, and learning can occur at whatever speed, and on whatever schedule, the student desires?
Without denying these obvious virtues of on-line education, I can only fall back on my own experiences teaching during the pandemic, which felt a lot like driving through the desert while searching for my favorite pre-pandemic restaurants, most of which were closed for business. In the Fall of 2020, I taught four classes in a blended (half on-line, half in-class) environment in order to create some sense of normalcy to the students’ college experience (and my own). However, like Galuten, I found it strangely flavorless, a banquet without tables, chairs, or utensils, eaten utterly alone. That fall, the normal classrooms of 20 to 35 students were broken up into small classes of 8 or 10, with all of the students masked and spaced out accordingly. I didn’t know any of my students’ faces, and was forced to focus on what I could see: their eyes, their clothing, their hair. Yet I could never see a smile, a grin of understanding, a scowl, or leer. Similarly, they could never see my own grins or scowls, many of which underscored my delivery and helped make sense of the material. In a strange way, I felt I was miming rather than teaching, and the students, clearly exhausted from the effort of watching, largely held back, many of them only attending sporadically.
Curiously, I found more or less the same experience on-line. The students simply had no appetite. On-line discussions were cursory, often cut-and-pasted paraphrases of someone else’s response, usually done at the last minute. Videos were rarely watched, Zoom conferences with the professor (where we could be unfettered and unmasked) strictly avoided. I initially loved the freedom of including as much material as I wanted, all neatly squared away into this and that tab and folder, and no longer prohibited by the 50 or 75-minute classroom. Yet the more time I seemed to give them, the less they took. Papers were shorter, rougher, less informed, barely researched (some outrageously plagiarized). In short, I felt that the flavor of learning had lost its relish, even more than in a normal semester, when the typical load of college classes can sometimes feel like a Nathan’s hot dog-eating competition. I ended that first Fall semester really depressed (or hungry, to extend the metaphor), struggling to think of how to resurrect the classroom in this isolated, anonymous age.
Luckily, COVID declined (more or less), students got vaccinated (more or less), and life gradually went back to normal (more or less). I now teach students in 20 to 35 student classrooms, meeting 2 or 3 times a week, unmasked, without social distancing. We’re all here, in the room together, learning the old fashioned way: a mixture of lecture, discussion, writing, joking, and arguing. Like someone with COVID who loses, then regains their sense of smell and taste, I could see the students doing the reading again, a few of them taking notes, asking questions, writing papers. Some, but not all. Some students have clearly lost their taste for learning altogether (if they ever had it), and couldn’t seem to remember how to talk and listen and interact in public. That might be the greatest uncelebrated tragedy of COVID: that even conversation has become enveloped in a “blanket of nervous, sad precaution,” so that most people don’t even see the need, especially when the information could be just as easily found on-line.
Of course, I still remember. I remember being a college student and walking into a new classroom on the first day of the semester, taking everything in: the smell of the classroom, the arrangement of the desks and students, the weight of the textbooks as I removed them from my bag. I can remember the way so many professors began their classes: some by launching right into the material, either telling stories, or reading poems, or warning us about the difficulty of the class. A few of them seemed as anxious and nervous as we were: I remember one new professor being positively terrified of us, scared to take two steps away from the lectern, and half-heartedly reading through the syllabus, and constantly asking us if we had any questions (cruelly, we never did). But mostly I remember leaving each class thinking how lucky I was to take it, and how excited I was to jump into the material, even it seemed too difficult or daunting to master in a mere sixteen weeks. I felt like I was embarking upon a real adventure, one where success or survival was not guaranteed, but was definitely worth the risk.
However, I also remember so many first days of my own as a professor. Pacing my office for the better part of an hour waiting for the minutes to trickle down to five minutes til. The terrifying walk down the hallway, seeing so many students jostling one another to get to class, some of them brushing past me to rush to my class. Then the utter thrill of walking through the door and feeling like I was suddenly on-stage, where everything I said from that moment forward was the class, was live, would prompt the question, will this be on the exam? I love that moment when you jump from terror to excitement, when some switch in your brain comes on and you realize that you’re channeling every professor you ever had, and are upholding a tradition as old as the university itself (and undoubtedly, much older).
I especially love the visceral thrill of looking out into a classroom of students and seeing their faces, and recognizing their own fear and uncertainty, their skepticism, and in some of them, disdain. I love trying to figure them out on that first day, wondering why each of them is here, what they want out of college, this class, their own lives, and how (if possible) I can help them achieve it. But more than anything, I love the moment when it starts to click, when something I say, or respond to, changes the dynamic of the class from reluctance to interest. It doesn’t always happen, mind you, especially on the first day. However, when it does, it’s magic, the most exciting feeling on earth. Better than laughter for a comedian, since laughter drowns out the next joke, and you have to wait, smiling, for the audience to settle down…by which point the magic might be lost, and you have to start all over again. Not so for an educator, since once interest is sparked, the students tend to listen even more intently, get silent, wait with eager anticipation.
One of my best first-day memories was in a pretty typical first-year class, when I had almost no agenda other than getting to know the students and let them know how this class was going to feel — the ambiance, so to speak. Like a quality restaurant, I wanted to seat them at a good table, show them the wine list, bring out bread, play the right music. There’s no rush to leave or to order; just relax and let me know when you’re ready. After the 45-minute class, one of the students in the back came up to me, eagerly but shyly, and told me, “I’m really excited about this class. At first I wasn’t sure, but man, I think I’m really going to like this semester.” That student became one of the best in the class, always eager, talking, doing quality work, etc. I wonder how prepared he was to do that from the outset?
One more memory to make — or belabor — my point. After a particularly exciting class in one of my lit surveys, somewhere around the middle of the semester, I remember another student coming up after class and saying, “wow, I’m really inspired today. That was a great discussion. I want to read everything I can about this author! Do they have any of his other books in the library?” In reality, the student probably didn’t make good on theirpromise, most likely because they were too damn busy to do so. But later, maybe in five or ten years, I’m pretty sure they were inspired to pick up another work, or buy a used copy somewhere, or at least remember how exciting and important they were (I think it was H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine). Inspiration is such a rare thing in our world, so rare, in fact, that I almost never hear people use it in day-to-day conversation. It’s an elusive experience, one not readily encountered at a job, or sadly, in the modern classroom. But when it strikes you, it changes your entire outlook, re-arranging your priorities, your aspirations, your expectations.
I remember getting so inspired after some of my Shakespeare classes that I would immediately go out and buy used copies of his plays, or simply watch what little Shakespeare I had recorded from old performances on PBS. I would even go so far to suggest that those brief, scattered inspirations from undergraduate classrooms led me to where I am today, as a professor of literature at a small regional university in Oklahoma. I never intended to be a teacher, much less to pursue an advanced degree in English. Yet when the possibilities of a text suddenly unfold before your eyes, egged on by a classroom’s back-and-forth debate, or a professor’s passionate lecture, you can never forget it. It becomes part of you, like a piece of music you play over and over again until it’s the yardstick by which you measure everything else. I had to hear more of that music, I had to learn how to have those inspirations more often, or at least understand where they came from. And so, without really planning it, I began wandering down the road that led me to a Master’s Degree, then a PhD, and ultimately, to becoming a teacher of English myself.
Like Galuten with food, I always assumed that books were what I loved most about teaching English. That as long as you had a book, you were doing okay. And as long as you put a book in front of a student and encouraged them to read it, some kind of learning would follow. Yet the pandemic helped me realize that as wonderful as books are, reading them in classrooms is even better. Talking about them is actually one of the greatest things on earth (small wonder why so many book clubs, formal and informal, persist long after high school and college). As a test, try this sometime: find someone reading a book you enjoy, and tell them, “oh hey, I read that book, too — I love it. Don’t you?” Unless they’re a total son-of-a-bitch (or in a particularly bad mood), their eyes will light up, and a conversation will start — maybe not the deepest or the most inspirational, but an instant meeting of the minds.
Simply put, we love to share ideas, and we love when someone else sees, reads, and recognizes something that we assumed was uniquely our own. It means we’re not alone, that we can share the deepest part of ourselves without feeling stupid or ashamed. What we lost briefly in the pandemic was this connection to our shared humanity, that intrinsic sense of knowing someone else through other people’s words (often long dead words, that are continually reborn through reading). When we moved on-line, it’s like we began seeing people as distinct from ourselves, people who read different books and thought different thoughts. In other words, people who weren’t like us. The best classroom experiences erase this dynamic, and make everyone — even when we have differences of opinion and experience — part of the same inquisitive, inspiring species.
If education is going to continue to remain relevant in this digital, pandemic world, we have to make it as human as possible. A room with people; a class with ideas; a book with several faces, all of them with voices, opinions, and emotions. We can’t let students leave a classroom thinking that knowledge is just a series of facts arranged in whatever order is convenient for that day, or that exam. We continue to read and learn as a means to jog the universal memory of a species that is still quite young, and is perhaps only just reaching its adolescence. But the less we see one another, the easier it is to fall prey to apocalyptic thinking: nothing matters anymore, it’s all irrelevant, we’re doomed anyway, what’s the point? How many times in the past have we reached the end of the world? How many doomsdays have we faced and overcome? And how many times has the world actually ended, and begun anew? Many more than we think or remember. And the only way forward is through the shared experience we call education, no matter which chapter we open it to, or how much or little we read. It’s a meal worth having a second or third helping…and inviting over some friends to help with the leftovers.
