“The weekend’s lost its ‘free-time’ grace;
My kitchen’s now my classroom’s place.
I walk around apartment space:
My courses are all quite self-paced!”
The 18 April 2020 poem directly noted the unique circumstances of teaching in the Spring 2020 semester, as all classes abruptly shifted online in mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The weekend’s lost its ‘free-time’ grace; /
My kitchen’s now my classroom’s place..”
The 2020-21 academic year has been a challenging mixture of online and in-person teaching, but Summer 2020 at least provided time to learn about resources and optimize an approach. In contrast, March and April 2020 were truly a blur, with everything suddenly and immediately online. Each day blended into the next, and it was vital to use the weekends to prepare course materials for the coming week, since the weeks themselves involved a steady stream of email conversations and meetings. The weekends no longer provided any break (they lost their “‘free-time’ grace”).
As I’m guessing was the case for many faculty members, my kitchen table became “my classroom’s place,” replacing my home desk; a computer, textbooks, notes, and a document camera required more space than a personal desk could provide!
“I walk around apartment space: /
My courses are all quite self-paced!”
Looking back at Spring 2020 from Spring 2021, I note that, although the current moment is still strange, it’s far less uncertain than those first weeks seemed. I spent most of last spring walking in only the geographical space of my apartment complex (“around apartment space”), as so many businesses and public spaces were also suddenly closed.
In terms of my teaching, the work alluded to in the first lines primarily involved creating asynchronous resources: providing documents and videos that could be linked online, so that students (whose schedules had likewise shifted enormously in only a few days) had as much flexibility as possible in learning the material. These could also be construed as “self-paced” courses… a description which mimicked my daily routine.
Chemphasis 