With the inevitable announcement of the closure of academic institutions in MA today, I am grieving the loss of a way of life. I know that things will return to some normalcy in the future, and I am looking forward that day. I miss my students, my colleagues, and the human interaction of daily life in education.

I have been spending a lot of time lately, more than is normal for me, staring at my computer screen scrolling through Facebook or Twitter or Email. It’s deadening, which is why I didn’t used to do it in the first place. I end up scrolling, zombified, reading headlines about crazy things the current administration has said, or done, or Tweeted. I see article after post about Covid-19, the effects it is having on communities and individuals. Then there are the posts, peppered throughout the interminable feed, from friends and family members posting things that matter to them personally – often posting pictures of food they just made, or a line they are standing in to get into a supermarket, or something nutty their kid just said. Those things, the posts from family and friends, are the reason that I continue to scroll.
Now, more than ever, as we are all finding our way living through this extremely strange time, I feel isolated. Even though I am quarantined with my husband – so I am not alone – I find that I am frequently lonely. I am looking for “social networking” sites to fulfill their promise of networking us socially.  I find that the promise is as empty as we have always known it to be.

I have had several conversations today with colleagues about different approaches to distance learning. There is absolutely no comparison to classroom teaching and teaching through the medium of digital space. No Zoom class can ever approximate the experience. In the classroom we learn from listening to each other. One student will ask a question and every other person hears that question. Some will wonder why they didn’t think of it, and others are just interested in the question/answer process. They listen. They listen to how the student asks the question, they see my facial expressions and body language as I respond.  Often, one question will beg another question, and so a chain of questions all stemming from that single, first question, leads us to places that no one in the class could have guessed – including me – when the class began. There is no way to replicate that experience with distance learning. Yes, people ask questions. It has been my experience that the type of question asked through an on-line format differs both in quality and variety. There is a certain intellectual play that happens in the classroom – a banter – that goes too fast for some and too slow for others. T.H. White said it beautifully in chapter five of Book I of, “The Once and Future King”:

“He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.”

That is what a good class is like, in my experience, having “the glee of the porpoise”…“pouring and leaping through strange seas.”

I miss the joy and the frustration of the classroom.
I miss a great many things that I feel many of us are missing.

I miss walking down the hallway and saying, “good morning” and “hello” to people as they pass by.
I miss the spontaneous conversations that happen departmentally and interdepartmentally each day.
I miss the warmth of the morning sun bathing the buildings in velvet light as I walk from the car park up the path through the roses.
I miss students shouting a “hello” from across the yard, or down the hall.
I miss the sense of space and designated purpose that hallways, classrooms, archways and doors provide for us.
. . .the anticipation of the bell to end the period, and the last few words of a lecture that isn’t quite finished.
. . .the dread of faculty meetings or mandatory professional learning communities.
. . . the joy from a student who just found out he was accepted to the school of his choice an the student who comes to you in despair because he feels out of place.
I miss the way teaching used to be. And I look forward to when we can return to those hallowed hallways in our school on the hill. How happy I will be to hear the spire bell toll one more time.