Nice to see you (at least I think that’s you behind the little black rectangle).
Reflecting on teaching in 2020 is as common as the phrase “you’re on mute.”
What did 2020 teach you about your teaching?
I spent the first part of the fall working out how to translate the material I normally deliver in a classroom into a ‘remote delivery’ format. From the outset, I didn’t confuse that with ‘online’ even though I knew that most of my teaching would be done over the Internet.
WHY? That’s simple. As my Dean repeated, helpfully, over and over, the vast majority of students (and faculty) who entered the COVID year of schooling didn’t choose to be online and most did so reluctantly.
My two least favourite words of this year “asynchronous” and “synchronous.” It’s not so much that I didn’t like to straddle them both but that they took me away from my comfort; constant purposeful reciprocal engagement as the way to customize and adapt on the fly to where my classes and I go together rather than me telling them what to know about.
we expected/wanted/were promised as close to the analog as possible … I didn’t generally like it or buy in easily.
