Fifth Week Grump

It was bound to happen. I’ve experienced my first bout of sustained grumpiness with remote teaching cramping my pedagogical style. The first three weeks went pretty well, but as I approached electron configurations and subtleties of the periodic table, being limited to a small window was very annoying. Here’s a snapshot of me about to explain Hund’s Rule.

 

In my typical in-person classroom, I have lots of board space, a separate are where I can project graphics (usually Figures from the textbook) and I can find places to stand where I can gesture significantly without blocking key written or projected information. With limited board space, I have to plan carefully what and how much I can have on the board at any one time. I have to be very strategic about how and when I toggle between sharing slides and writing on the board. And I have to bob in and out when I’m explaining something that requires gesturing, while being careful not to block the board too much. I happen to think gesturing helps a lot in chemistry because we’re trying to explain things that are too small to observe!

 

I’ve been grumpy about my limitations. I’m also grumpy about having to convert some well-tested pedagogical activities into their less well-tested and I suspect less effective counterparts. This didn’t bother me so much the first several weeks, because I was simply (and perhaps too easily) pleased that I wasn’t completely botching my first experience of remote teaching and that I was doing better than expected. Maybe it’s all about expectations. Now that I’ve overcome some of the initial challenges in online teaching, I’m expecting to do better. I know I can do better.

 

An argument can be made that remote teaching requires substantially different pedagogical strategies compared to in-person teaching and learning. I’ve been reading the primary literature in this regard, and there’s a strong case to be made for significantly overhauling my class and my approach. I haven’t done that. While I have made significant changes to enhance asynchronous engagement of the students with the material and with each other, the core of my pedagogical approach remains roughly similar – within the affordances of the Zoom medium. I think what I’m doing is true of most instructors; we’ve made some changes but we’ve not completely overhauled our pedagogical approach. Over time we might. But in the meantime, the changes are incremental. That’s not a bad strategy. It balances our strengths, our prior experience, and it is more practical time-wise. We also learn a few things along the way, incrementally of course.

 

So perhaps there’s not so much to be grumpy about. My grumpiness has been wearing off as the week progresses. There’s still low-level minor irritation, but I’m still very much enjoying teaching and interacting with students. However as I look to the horizon, it’s likely we will remain remote for the spring semester, and possibly even next fall. Envisioning a longer haul should encourage me to take more steps to refine my remote pedagogical approach, but a part of me wishes things will go back to the “old normal” soon. Thinking about the “new normal” makes me grumpy.