In praise of online teaching
Like many others, a couple of months ago I was thrown into the new world of smart working. In my case, it involved the infamous Zoom platform and a dozen of Spanish kids per hour. After diligently going through all phases of panic, migraine, rejection, stress-eating and acceptance, I have finally stopped for long enough to realize what good came out of this.
Classroom management
Every teacher knows the feeling of teaching the perfect class on the day a certain student wouldn’t show up. Each group of kids is an ecosystem, and a single member can destroy its harmony by either singing Baby Shark or simply existing.
This, however, didn’t seem to happen in the online classroom. As they weren’t in the same room, that group chemistry couldn’t build up. Instead, the children stared at their screen, in silence, looking cute and slightly intimidated in their oversized headphones.
At the beginning I thought it wouldn’t last. It had to be a ‘first class of the year’ situation, where the lion cubs quietly study their prey and establish the most dramatic way to end its life. And yet, two months later nothing has changed. A few audacious ones have tried, recently, to throw a bomb in the chat. But it only took a click for me to defuse it.
Work-life balance
It took me forty-five minutes by public transport to get to the school I work for. That meant spending 8–12 hours a day away from home, running from place to place and gobbling up take-away paella as I scribbled down my lesson plans.
Online teaching was a huge, sudden adjustment, and I’m still suffering from a lack of proper equipment. My office is the kitchen table, my laptop’s battery left me on day two of lockdown, and I could totally use a big screen to keep a tired eye on both my PowerPoints and my twelve little monkeys.
But it wasn’t just that: once removed the kinaesthetic element from my teaching, I soon found out that I had to invest more time curing the visuals and improving the pace of my lessons. So there went the commuting hours. Extra time had to go into marking the photographs of the kids’ homework on Paint. And once I realized I would finish the programme a month before the end of the academic year, a bunch of new activities had to be adapted for the screen.
Even so, my quality of life has vastly improved. An hour break now is enough to make a decent meal and to eat it with my partner as we watch our favourite show on the sofa. Having stronger, better organized lessons makes me a calmer and more enthusiastic teacher. And if I forget to start the washing machine, I can always go press the button as they practice the first conditional in their breakout rooms.
Rapport
The online classroom might seem a colder environment, with no hugs and no pranksters pushing away your chair as you try to sit on it. I expected that too, and for a while it was just so. The kids didn’t know how to connect to the audio, let alone their parents. And on top of the language barrier, bad Wi-Fi often made communication broken and awkward.
Slowly, however, things improved. The children seemed to figure out ‘el zoom’ fast enough to rock Star Wars backgrounds on week two. I could have relaxed conversations with the early comers while sipping tea in my living room, instead of hurriedly trying to fix a pile of books with my coat on. We all smiled more, talked less nonsense, and by sharing tacit knowledge that we were all in our pyjamas bottoms, got a little closer.
Most importantly, the screen broke down the physical barriers of the classroom. Suddenly, there were no first nor last rows any more. As I controlled the microphones, fast learners stopped firing all the correct answers. Introvert and shy students didn’t feel the need to hide behind the loud ones any longer, and some of them even started to shine. The internet made all of them more equal than they’d ever been before.
