Remote First Day

I got into work bright and early at half past seven; that’s when the on-campus check-in kiosk opens to get a temperature check and receive a wristband thus allowing entry into buildings. (I filled out a self-declaration form before leaving home.) I felt relatively ready for my first ever remote teaching day. In my office, I opened the Zoom classroom session at 7:52am, and we started on time at 8am. There were just a couple of stragglers a couple of minutes late, but everyone showed up for General Chemistry 1. I have the Honors section which is nice because its a smaller class.

 

I have a First Day plan in my introductory chemistry courses, but I also take time to answer any questions on the syllabus that day. I’d like to think my syllabus is clear and organized (and for the most part I think the students found it so), however instead of the usual 10 minutes (in a face-to-face class), half the class time went by in Q&A. Perhaps this is not surprising when one has new college students in a new environment. I was forewarned by my colleagues (having missed last semester’s pivot) that “everything takes longer than usual”. It certainly did.

 

I had to trim the rest of my planned activities (i.e., group work and discussion) and resort to “mostly lecture” with a number of interactive question and answer segments. I had students pose answers and thoughts through the Chat, which was faster than individuals speaking up. Overall, we covered the necessary important content, and I think I didn’t rush things. I had practiced switching back and forth between sharing my screen and the “gallery” view of the class and things worked fine. After class, I stayed back to answer several other questions, and that went very smoothly. Overall, it was not a stellar class session, but not terrible, in my opinion. (Don’t know what the students thought.)

 

Office hours started at 9:30am, and I had one conscientious student who had read ahead (virtually) stop by to ask me a host of chemistry questions. They were excellent questions, the type you’d want your students to ask: the why questions! Close to 10am as I was answering the last few questions, the internet started to cut in and out. I assumed it was the student’s connection, but we managed to get through our discussion. Then disaster struck. There was a campus-wide internet outage, both wifi and hard-wired ethernet. While thankfully, I had finished class (and had no other students in office hours), some of my colleagues were not so lucky. If anyone else tried to get into office hours (unlikely), it wouldn’t have worked. What a bad omen for the first day! I’m sure many complaints were forwarded to the powers-that-be. I refrained.

 

I had already decided to have lunch at home and teach my afternoon origins-of-life class from there. It’s a discussion-based class and I don’t need to draw lots of structures or write a bunch of equations. I’m very pleased to say (in my opinion) that class went very smoothly. Everyone logged in by the start time of 2:30pm. Discussion was robust. Timing worked well. My planned activity discussing definitions of life went smoothly, including assigning students to breakout rooms and my hobnobbing from one group to another. Everyone seemed engaged and stayed on task, and I had fun in class. Hopefully the students did too! Not only did I survive, I might have thrived. Hurrah! (I recognize that because this is an elective class, only students who are really interested in the topic sign up, which usually makes the special topics class a joy to teach.)

 

Finally, I perused the recorded videos of my class sessions. My main editing task was to snip off the beginning and the end. There’s some meet and greet early on, and I try to interact with the students in the five minutes before class. At the end of my classes today, I was chatting with my advisees about class schedules, registration, and some catching up, since I was away on sabbatical all of last year. I did watch a few samples of myself explaining something or engaged in a discussion with students, and it was both instructional and entertaining. I’m more animated than I thought I would be even though I was sitting rather than standing, and I still gestured a lot. However, my gaze was all over the place because sometimes I’m looking at the chat, or the person speaking, or my slides, or some notes I have beside my computer. I also made many “ah” and “um” noisy pauses. Clearly, I need more practice to smooth out my remote teaching including timing issues, but I’m looking forward to the end of the semester when I look back and see how I have (hopefully) improved.

 

All in all, a decently good first day for me. A bad first day for I.T.