This brings us up to the present day. From here on in I think I’m breaking out of a strict timeline; there’s a few things to fill in, including more from those Maine interviews in 2001.
By the time I started teaching in January 2022, I hadn’t had to go to an office full-time for almost four years. Four. Most people had been out for only two.
A core of my coworkers at my last job were in Ireland, but most of them were scattered all over the globe. Out of all of them, I’ve still only met my boss and one coworker in person.
Before that, I was contracting. Before that, in-person in the office only once a month, commuting to Boston for the purpose. The job before that I had to be in offices, but we travelled, too, and I worked with remote teams in India and Brazil. And before that, again, 2015-2016: another year of remote work.
2022 classes began remote due to the omicron variant spike in cases. We returned to in-person as the numbers went down again. Except for one class: my class at Adelphi was not only due to be all-remote the whole semester, it was also slated to be another kind of “hybrid”: synchronous/asynchronous. Some weeks we’d meet online, other weeks we wouldn’t meet. That knocked me for a loop. How was I supposed to gauge whether my students understood the material if I couldn’t check for looks of confusion? What would I do on the asynchronous weeks instead of holding a discussion? Just assign more reading?
I struggled with my students’ names, in person. Our video call software had not only plastered names helpfully on their headboxes, it had also allowed me to see their entire faces. Back in the classroom, they wore masks. To make it harder, three-quarters of the students in one of my classes had one legal name on the class roster, while the video call software offered a mixed bag of their Chinese names and the names they had chosen in English, to fend off ham-fisted American pronunciation. One had chosen Ellie, another Ella. Two were due to stay remote all semester due to visa issues; a third lurked online even though the registrar forbade it. Sometimes they were cameras-on, sometimes cameras-off; I shared my screen, and the interface hid them. I asked the students to make name cards in person, and fumbled with embarrassment through whichever names I could summon when I called on them.
But we make each other real, with time. No class roster is ever final, and the long list of names never means much when it’s your first class, your first time with a cohort. Students drop out. It’s only through repeated conversation, eye contact, gestures, smiles—agreement, encouragement, debates—that we become a classroom.