Feeling Like a Dinosaur

My department had a tip-trading session on best practices as we prepare to go all-remote this Fall. Since I didn’t experience the Spring pivot, I found the meeting very useful, benefiting from the experiences of those who had gone before. Straight talk from folks teaching in a similar subject area and context gets to the heart of the matter in a way that videos and articles from people in other institutions do not (even if they are slickly produced or well-written). I still don’t feel ready but I am preparing to do my best when classes start a week from Monday.

 

I was impressed by my colleagues. What a great bunch of folks! Different individuals tried different things, and I was amazed at how quickly some of them were able to adapt to the technology. I also heard about their frustrations as to what didn’t work so well, but overall the session was full of positive “here’s what worked for me” examples. After the session, however, I felt somewhat deflated. Reflecting on this during my Zoom break, I realized that I was feeling like a dinosaur. Here’s Emily the Brontosaurus (from the excellent time-traveling card game Chrononauts) to illustrate. 

I’m not a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination, given that I’m a computational chemist, however I’m certainly not an early adopter, and much of my teaching looks “old school”. I do use some slides in class (showing Figures from the textbook) but by and large my classes resemble an interactive session of problem-solving with students using the white board. I rarely use the Learning Management System and have found it more efficient, quick, and compact, to use my simple old-school HTML-hacked (institutional) home-page to deliver my course materials. I’m not sure anyone else in the university uses these pages, and few outside of ITS these days even know of their existence.

 

Perhaps I’m only good at using the technology I was socialized into in my younger days, when I was more adaptable. I found it more efficient to stick with the old ways even as technology progressed. In that sense, I might be like a dinosaur. A very old-school teacher with old-school tricks that have served me (and I’d argue my students) well over the years. But it might no longer do so in a remote environment. The environmental change has forced me to adapt. Or die. Evolution in action. Perhaps I’ll do okay after all. I have shown some capacity to adapt, although often because I was forced to do so – like when ITS told me they would no longer support my use of Unix e-mail clients and that I must switch over to the newer clients. (Apparently, I was one of the last five or ten people to switch over, although this was well over a decade ago.)

 

While part of me is annoyed at having to adapt, another part of me sees this as a good thing – a chance to learn some new tricks, and maybe even improve my own teaching as a result. It has certainly made me read a lot about pedagogy in the new age of remote, and allowed me to ponder the many pros and cons, both practically and philosophically. Perhaps I won’t feel so dinosaur-ish after several weeks of online teaching under my belt. I’d like to shake that old, tired, feeling. A change would be nice!