Frantic Start

Ten minutes to the start of my 8am class. Zoom server site not found. Check my internet. It’s working fine. Maybe the LMS access link is broken. Use direct Zoom link for my institution. No luck. Try parent Zoom login site. Nothing. Dash a quick e-mail to I.T. services.

 

Four minutes to the start of class. Dash a quick e-mail to students telling them to take the quiz on the LMS. Start preparing for how to teach the day’s material asynchronously.

 

8:02am. One student makes it into Zoom class and sends me an e-mail. I try to get in but this doesn’t work the first time. Try a couple of other options. Eventually I make it in. A second student has arrived. It’s now 8:05am. I dash a quick e-mail to the class telling them that Zoom class is back on track. I start seeing a few others pop in, and I ask them to contact any of their other classmates (by text) to let them know.

 

8:10am. We’re finally ready to begin. I’m somewhat flustered, but manage my way through class in what’s clearly not the smoothest session. We’re learning the calculations for how to make buffer solutions. Thankfully, much of the groundwork was done in the previous class, and we’re mainly doing applications. My students bear with me, and I think we get through okay. I suppress the desire to rush but instead cut out a few non-essential parts and write a little less on the board. Phew!

 

Not a great way to start the day, and it reminded me that the limits of technology can strike at any moment. It could be an internet connection that stops working. It could be a particular server that goes down. Or a bandwidth problem. It could even be a loss of electricity. Or a device that has decided to croak or hang or misbehave. My students, with all their classes on Zoom, have experienced this several times over. I, on the other hand, have not for the most part. That’s because I teach my classes from my office with a stable ethernet (and I can use wifi as a backup), our campus has backup generators (should power fail, and the science building is high priority!), and my office desktop almost always behaves well. This reminded me how fortunate I am.

 

But I’m looking forward to when I no longer have to use Zoom. My campus is one among a growing number that will be requiring students to get vaccinations for the fall semester. We the faculty have been told that we’re expected to teach in-person. I hope there isn’t a summer Covid spike in my area. I’m not sure how I feel about teaching while masked and looking at the faces of my masked students, maybe feeling a little inhibited about in-person interactions. But I think it will be better than Zoom. As we’ve heard aplenty, we’re in the new normal.

 

So many parts have to run smoothly behind-the-scenes for an operation such as Zoom classes to run smoothly. It’s only when something doesn’t work that we perceive a glimpse of the complexity and how many things can go wrong. It’s amazing that it all works most of the time. Like the human body. It’s amazing how many things could go wrong, but most days I take it for granted that things will work well, and chug along happily. But as I age and take notice of the wear and tear, I’m thankful for how this living mass of cells keeps going. For now. Sometimes the wake-up call of a frantic start is a good reminder to be thankful.